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Jerome K. Jerome's Books. 



AUTHOR'S EDITION. 



DIARY OF A PILGRIMAGE 

iAND SIX ESS A KJ). 

With upwards of loo Illustrations by G. G. Fraser. 
i2mo, cloth, $1.25 ; paper, 40c. 

THREE MEN IN A BOAT 

{TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG). 

Illustrations by A. Fredericks. i2mo, cloth, $1.25; 
i6mo, paper, 40c. 

ON THE STAGE— AND OFF: 

THE BRIEF CAREER OF A WOULD-BE 
ACTOR. 

i2mo, cloth, $1.00 ; paper, 25c. 

TOLD AFTER SUPPER. 

With q6 or 97 Illustrations by Kenneth M. Skeaping. 
i2mo, cloth, $1 00; i6mo, paper, 30c. 

IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN 
IDLE FELLOW. 

i2ino, cloth, $1.00 ; i6mo, paper, 35c. 

STAGE-LAND. 

CURIOUS HABITS AND CUSTOMS OF ITS 
INHABITANTS. 

Illustrated by J. Bernard Partridge. i2mo, 
cloth, $1.00; i6mo, paper, 30c. 



THE IDLE THOUGHTS 

OF AN IDLE FELLOW 



A BOOK FOR 

AN IDLE HOLIDAY 



JEROME KrjfeROME 



AUTHOR OF "THREE MEN IN A BOAT/' ETC. 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
1890 




it 







0^ 



10 

THE VERY DEAR AND WELL-BELOVED 



3frien& 



OF MY PROSPEROUS AND EVIL DAYS— 

TO THE FRIEND 
WHO, THOUGH, IN THE EARLY STAGES OF OUR ACQUAINTANCE- 
SHIP, DID OFTTIMES DISAGREE WITH ME, HAS SINCE 
BECOME TO BE MY VERY WARMEST COMRADE — 

TO THE FRIEND 

WHC^ HOWEVER OFTEN I MAY PUT HIM OUT, NEVER (NOW) 

UPSETS ME IN REVENGE — 

TO THE FRIEND 
WHO, TREATED WITH MARKED COOLNESS BY ALL THE FEMALE 
MEMBERS OF MY HOUSEHOLD, AND REGARDED WITH SUSPI- 
CION BY MY VERY DOG, NEVERTHELESS, SEEMS DAY 
BY DAY TO BE MORE DRAWN BY ME, AND IN 
■RETURN, TO MORE AND MORE IMPREGNATE ME 
WITH THE ODOR OF HIS FRIENDSHIP — 

TO THE FRIEND 

WHO NEVER TELLS ME OF MY FAULTS, NEVER WANTS TO 

BORROW MONEY, AND NEVER TALKS ABOUT HIMSELF — 

TO THE COMPANION 

OF MY IDLE HOURS, THE SOOTHER OF MY SORROWS, 

THE CONFIDANT OF MY JOYS AND HOPES — 

MY OLDEST AND STRONGEST 



pipe, 



THIS LITTLE VOLUME 

IS 
GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY 

DEDICATED. 



PREFACE. 



One or two friends to whom I showed these 
papers in MS. having observed that they were 
not half bad ; and some of my relations having 
promised to buy the book, if it ever came out, 
I feel I have no right to longer delay its issue. 
But for this, as one may say, public demand, I, 
perhaps, should not have ventured to offer these 
mere ** idle thoughts ** of mine as mental food 
for the English-speaking peoples of the earth. 
What readers ask nowadays in a book is that 
it should improve, instruct, and elevate. This 
book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot con- 
scientiously recommend it for any useful purposes 
whatever. All I can suggest is, that when you 
get tired of reading " the best hundred books," 
you may take this up for half an hour. It will 
be a change. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

On being Idle, - - - i 

On being in Love, ...---. 13 
On being in the Blues, • - - - • - - 27 
On being Hard Up, -..--- - 37 

On Vanity and Vanities, ------ 49 

On Getting on in the World, ----- 63 

On the Weather, ,-.----.75 

On Cats and Dogs, -.--.- 92 

On being Shy, 113 

On Babies, 128 

On Eating and Drinking, 142 

On Furnished Apartments, ------ 157 

On Dress and Deportment, 174 

On Memory, 190 



i 



THE IDLE THOUGHTS 

OF 

AN IDLE FELLOW. 



ON BEING IDLE, 

TV T OW this is a subject on which I flatter 
^ ^ myself I really am au fait. The gentle- 
man who, when I was young, bathed me at wis- 
dom's font for nine guineas a term — no extras — 
used to say he never knew a boy who could do 
less work in more time; and I remember my 
poor grandmother once incidentally observing, in 
the course of an instruction upon the use of the 
prayer-book, that it was highly improbable that I 
should ever do much that I ought not to do, but, 
that she felt convinced beyond a doubt, that I 
should leave undone pretty well everything that 
I ought to do. 

I am afraid I have somewhat belied half the 
dear old lady's prophecy. Heaven help me! I 
have done a good many things that I ought not 



2 ON BEING IDLE. 

to have done, in spite of my laziness. But I 
have fully confirmed the accuracy of her judg- 
ment so far as neglecting much that I ought not 
to have neglected is concerned. Idling always 
has been my strong point. I take no credit to 
myself in the matter — it is a gift. Few possess 
it. There are plenty of lazy people and plenty 
of slow-coaches, but a genuine idler is a rarity. 
He is not a man who slouches about with his 
hands in his pockets. On the contrary, his most 
startling characteristic is that he is always 
intensely busy. 

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly 
unless one has plenty of work to do. There is 
no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing 
to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation 
then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like 
kisses, to be sweet must be stolen. 

Many years ago, when I was a young man, I 
was taken very ill — I never could see myself that 
much was the matter with me, except that I had 
a beastly cold. But I suppose it was something 
very serious, for the doctor said that I ought to 
have come to him a month before, and that if it 
(whatever it was") had gone on for another week 



ON BEING IDLE. 3 

he would not have answered for the conse- 
quences. It is an extraordinary thing, but I 
never knew a doctor called into any case yet, but 
what it transpired that another day's delay would 
have rendered cure hopeless. Our medical guide, 
philosopher, and friend is like the hero in a melo- 
drama, he always comes upon the scene just, and 
only just, in the nick of time. It is Providence, 
that is what it is. 

Well, as I was saying, I was very ill, and was 
ordered to Buxton for a month, with strict in- 
junctions to do nothing whatever all the while 
that I was there. "Rest is what you require," 
said the doctor, "perfect rest." 

It seemed a delightful prospect. "This man 
evidently understands my complaint," said I, and 
I pictured to myself a glorious time — a four 
weeks' dolce far niente with a dash of illness 
in it. Not too much illness, but just illness 
enough — just sufficient to give it the flavor of 
suffering, and make it poetical. I should get up 
late, sip chocolate, and have my breakfast in 
slippers and a dressing-gown. I should lie out in 
the garden in a hammock, and read sentimental 
novels with a melancholy ending, until the 



4 ON BEING IDLE. 

book should fall from my listless hand, and I 
should recline there, dreamily gazing into the 
deep blue of the firmament, watching the fleecy 
clouds, floating like white-sailed ships, across its 
depths, and listening to the joyous song of the 
birds, and the low rustling of the trees. Or, on 
becoming too weak to go out of doors, 1 should 
sit propped up with pillows, at the open window 
of the ground floor front, and look wasted and 
interesting, so that all the pretty girls would sigh 
as they passed by. 

And, twice a day, I should go down in a Bath 
chair to the Colonnade, to drink the waters. Oh, 
those waters! I knew nothing about them then, 
and was rather taken with the idea. "Drinking 
the waters" sounded fashionable and Queen 
Annefied, and I thought I should like them. 
But, ugh! after the first three or four mornings! 
Sam Weller's description of them, as "having a 
taste of warm flat-irons," conveys only a faint 
idea of their hideous nauseousness. If anything 
could make a sick man get well quickly, it would 
be the knowledge that he must drink a glassful of 
them every day until he was recovered. I drank 
them neat for six consecutive days, and they 



ON BEING IDLE. 5 

nearly killed me; but, after then, I adopted the 
plan of taking a stiff glass of brandy and water 
immediately on the top of them, and found much 
relief thereby. I have been informed since, by 
various eminent medical gentlemen, that the 
alcohol must have entirely counteracted the 
effects of the chalybeate properties contained in 
the water. I am glad I was lucky enough to hit 
upon the right thing. 

But "drinking the waters" was only a small 
portion of the torture I experienced during that 
memorable month, a month which was, without 
exception, the most miserable I have ever spent. 
During the best part of it, I religiously followed 
the doctor's mandate, and did nothing whatever, 
except moon about the house and garden, and go 
out for two hours a day in a Bath chair. That 
did break the monotony to a certain extent. 
There is more excitement about Bath-chairing — 
especially if you are not used to the exhilarating 
exercise — than might appear to the casual ob- 
server. A sense of danger, such as a mere out- 
sider might not understand, is ever present to the 
mind of the occupant. He feels convinced every 
minute that the whole concern is going over, a 



6 ON BEING IDLE. 

conviction which becomes especially lively when- 
ever a ditch or a stretch of newly macadamized 
road comes in sight. Every vehicle that passes 
he expects is going to run into him ; and he 
never finds himself ascending or descending a 
hill, without immediately beginning to speculate 
upon his chances, supposing — as seems extremely 
probable — that the weak-knee'd controller of his 
destiny should let go. 

But even this diversion failed to enliven after 
a while, and the efinui became perfectly unbear- 
able. I felt my mind giving way under it. It is 
not a strong mind, and I thought it would be un- 
wise to tax it too far. So somewhere about the 
twentieth morning, I got up early, had a good 
breakfast, and walked straight off to Hayfield at 
the foot of the Kinder Scout — a pleasant, busy, 
little town, reached through a lovely valley, and 
with two sweetly pretty women in it. At least 
they were sweetly pretty then ; one passed me on 
the bridge, and, I think, smiled ; and the other 
was standing at an open door, making an unre- 
munerative investment of kisses upon a red-faced 
baby. But it is years ago, and I daresay they 
have both grown stout and snappish since that 



ON BEING IDLE. 7 

time. Coming back, I saw an old man breaking 
stones, and it roused such strong longing in me 
to use my arms, that I offered him a drink to let 
me take his place. He was a kindly old man, 
and he humored me. I went for those stones 
with the accumulated energy of three weeks, and 
did more work in half an hour than he had done 
all day. But it did not make him jealous. 

Having taken the plunge, I went further and 
further into dissipation, going out for a long walk 
every morning, and listening to the band in the 
Pavilion every evening. But the days still 
passed slowly notwithstanding, and I was heartily 
glad when the last one came, and I was being 
whirled away from gouty, consumptive Buxton 
to London with its stern work and life. I looked 
out of the carriage as we rushed through Hen- 
don in the evening. The lurid glare overhanging 
the mighty city seemed to warm my heart and 
when, later on, my cab rattled out of St. Pancras' 
station, the old familiar roar that came swelling 
up around me sounded the sweetest music I had 
heard for many a long day. 

I certainly did not enjoy that month's idling. 
I like idling when I ought not to be idling; not 



8 ON BEING IDLE. 

when it is the only thing I have to do. That is 
my pig-headed nature. The time when I like 
best to stand with my back to the fire, calcula- 
ting how much I owe, is when my desk is heaped 
highest with letters that must be answered by 
the next post. When I like to dawdle longest 
over my dinner, is when I have a heavy evening's 
work before me. And if, for some urgent reason, 
I ought to be up particularly early in the morn- 
ing, it is then, more than at any other time, that 
I love to lie an extra half-hour in bed. 

Ah ! how delicious it is to turn over and go to 
sleep again: "just for five minutes." Is there 
any human being, I wonder, besides the hero of 
a Sunday-school "tale for boys," who ever gets up 
willingly? There are some men to whom getting 
up at the proper time is an utter impossibility. 
If eight o'clock happens to be the time that they 
should turn out, then they lie till half-past. If 
circumstances change, and half-past eight be- 
comes early enough for them, then it is nine 
before they can rise ; they are like the statesman 
of whom it was said that he was always punc- 
tually half an hour late. They try all manner of 
schemes. They buy alarm clocks (artful contriv- 



ON BEING IDLE. 9 

ances that go off at the wrong time, and alarm 
the wrong people). They tell Sarah Jane to 
knock at the door and call them, and Sarah Jane 
does knock at the door, and does call them, and 
they grunt back "awri," and then go comfortably 
to sleep again. I knew one man who would 
actually get out, and have a cold bath ; and even 
that was of no use, for, afterwards, he would 
jump into bed again to warm himself. 

I think myself that I could keep out of bed all 
right, if I once got out. It is the wrenching 
away of the head from the pillow that I find so 
hard, and no amount of over-night determination 
makes it easier. I say to myself, after having 
wasted the whole evening, "Well, I wont do any 
more work to-night ; I'll get up early to-morrow 
morning" ; and I am thoroughly resolved to do 
so — then. In the morning, however, I feel less 
enthusiastic about the idea, and reflect that it 
would have been much better if I had stopped 
up last night. And then there is the trouble of 
dressing, and the more one thinks about that, the 
more one wants to put it off. 

It is a strange thing this bed, this mimic grave, 
where we stretch our tired limbs, and sink away 



lO ON BEING IDLE. 

SO quietly into the silence and rest. "Oh bed, oh 
bed, delicious bed, that heaven on earth to the 
weary head," as sang poor Hood, you are a kind 
old nurse to us fretful boys and girls. Clever 
and foolish, naughty and good, you take us all in 
your motherly lap, and hush our wayward crying. 
The strong man full of care — the sick man full of 
pain — the little maiden, sobbing for her faithless 
lover — like children, we lay our aching heads on 
your white bosom, and you gently soothe us off 
to by-by. 

Our trouble is sore indeed, when you turn 
away, and will not comfort us. How long the 
dawn seems coming, when we cannot sleep ! Oh ! 
those hideous nights, when we toss and turn in 
fever and pain, when we lie, like living men 
among the dead, staring out into the dark hours 
that drift so slowly between us and the light. 
And oh ! those still more hideous nights, when 
we sit by another in pain, when the low fire start- 
les us every now and then with a falling cinder, 
and the tick of the clock seems a hammer, beat- 
ing out the life that we are watching. 

But enough of beds and bed-rooms. I have 
kept to them too long, even for an idle fellow. 



OM BEING IDLE, 11 

Let us come out, and have a smoke. That 
wastes time just as well, and does not look so 
bad. Tobacco has been a blessing to us idlers. 
What the civil service clerks before Sir Walter's 
time found to occupy their minds with, it is hard 
to imagine. I attribute the quarrelsome nature 
of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the 
want of the soothing weed. They had no work 
to do, and could not smoke, and the consequence 
was they were for ever fighting and rowing. If, 
by any extraordinary chance, there was no war 
going, then they got up a deadly family feud with 
the next-door neighbor, and if, in spite of this, 
they still had a few spare moments on their hands, 
they occupied them with discussions as to whose 
sweetheart was the best looking, the arguments 
employed on both sides being battle-axes, clubs, 
etc. Questions of taste were soon decided in 
those days. When a twelfth century youth fell 
in love, he did not take three paces backwards, 
gaze into her eyes, and tell her she was too beau- 
tiful to live. He said he would step outside and 
see about it. And if, when he got out, he met a 
man and broke his head — the other man's head, I 
mean — then that proved that his — the first fel- 



12 ON BEING IDLE. 

low's girl — was a pretty girl. But if the other 
fellow broke Jiis head — not his own, you know, 
but the other fellow's — the other fellow to the 
second fellow, that is, because of course the other 
fellow would only be the other fellow to him, not 
the first fellow, who — well, if he broke his head, 
then his girl — not the other fellow's but the fel- 
low who was the — Look here, if A broke B's 
head, then A's girl was a pretty girl ; but if B 
broke A's head, then A's girl wasn't a pretty girl, 
but B's girl was. That was their method of con- 
ducting art criticism. 

Nowadays we light a pipe, and let the girls 
fight it out amongst themselves. 

They do it very well. They are getting to do 
all our work. They are doctors, and barristers, 
and artists. They manage theaters, and promote 
swindles, and edit newspapers. I am looking for- 
ward to the time when we men shall have noth- 
ing to do but lie in bed till twelve, read two nov- 
els a day, have nice little five o'clock teas all to 
ourselves, and tax our brains with nothing more 
trying than discussions upon the latest patterns 
in trousers, and arguments as to what Mr. Jones's 
coat was made of and whether it fitted him. It 
is a glorious prospect — for idle fellows. 



ON BEING IN LOVE, 

'\/'OU'VE been in love, of course! If not 
'*' you've got it to come. Love is like the 
measles ; we all have to go through it. Also like 
the measles, we take it only once. One never 
need be afraid of catching it a second time. The 
man who has had it can go into the most danger- 
ous places, and play the most foolhardy tricks 
with perfect safety. He can picnic in shady 
woods, ramble through leafy aisles, and linger on 
mossy seats to watch the sunset. He fears a 
quiet country house no more than he would his 
own club. He can join a family party to go 
down the Rhine. He can, to see the last of a 
friend, venture into the very jaws of the marriage 
cermony itself. He can keep his head through 
the whirl of a ravishing waltz, and rest afterward 
in a dark conservatory, catching nothing more 
lasting than a cold. He can brave a moonlight 
walk adown sweet-scented lanes, or a twilight pull 
among the somber rushes. He can get over a 

13 



14 ON BEING IN LOVE. 

stile without danger, scramble through a tangled 
hedge without being caught, come down a slip- 
pery path without falling. He can look into 
sunny eyes, and not be dazzled. He listens to 
the siren voices, yet sails on with unveered helm. 
He clasps white hands in his, but no electric 
"Lulu"-like force holds him bound in their dainty 
pressure. 

No, we never sicken with love twice. Cupid 
spends no second arrow on the same heart. 
Love's handmaids are our life-long friends. Re- 
spect, and Admiration, and Affection, our doors 
may always be left open for, but their great celes- 
tial master, in his royal progress, pays but one 
visit, and departs. We like, we cherish, we are 
very, very fond of — but we never love again. A 
man's heart is a firework that once in its time 
flashes heavenward. Meteor-like, it blazes for a 
moment, and lights with its glory the whole world 
beneath. Then the night of our sordid common- 
place life closes in around it, and the burnt-out 
case, falling back to earth, lies useless and un- 
cared for, slowly smouldering into ashes. Once, 
breaking loose from our prison bonds, we dare, as 
mighty old Prometheus dared, to scale the Olym- 



01^ BEWG IN LOVE. 15 

pian mount, and snatch from Phoebus' chariot the 
fire of the gods. Happy those who, hastening 
down again e'er it dies out, can kindle their 
earthly altars at its flame. Love is too pure a 
light to burn long among the noisome gases that 
we breathe, but before it is choked out we may 
use it as a torch to ignite the cosy fire of affec- 
tion. 

And, after all, that warming glow is more 
suited to our cold little back-parlor of a world 
than is the burning spirit, love. Love should be 
the vestal fire of some mighty temple — some vast 
dim fane whose organ music is -the rolling of the 
spheres. Affection will burn cheerily when the 
white flame of love is flickered out. Affection is 
a fire that can be fed from day to day, and be 
piled up ever higher as the wintry years draw 
nigh. Old men and women can sit by it with 
their thin hands clasped, the little children can 
nestle down in front, the friend and neighbor has 
his welcome corner by its side, and even shaggy 
Fido and sleek Titty can toast their noses at the 
bars. 

Let us heap the coals of kindness upon that 
fire. Throw on your pleasant words, your gentle 



l6 ON^ BEING IN LOVE, 

pressures of the hand, your thoughtful and unsel- 
fish deeds. Fan it with good humor, patience, 
and forbearance. You can let the wind blow and 
the rain fall unheeded then, for your hearth will 
be warm and bright, and the faces round it will 
make sunshine in spite of the clouds without. 

I am afraid, dear Edwin and Angelina, you 
expect too much from love. You think there is 
enough of your little hearts to feed this fierce, 
devouring passion for all your long lives. Ah, 
young folk! don't rely too much upon that un- 
steady flicker. It will dwindle and dwindle as 
the months roll on, and there is no replenishing 
the fuel. You will watch it die out in anger and 
disappointment. To each it will seem that it is 
the other who is growing colder. Edwin sees 
with bitterness that Angelina no longer runs to 
the gate to meet him, all smiles and blushes; 
and when he has a cough now, she doesn't begin 
to cry, and, putting her arms round his neck, say 
that she cannot live without him. The most she 
will probably do is to suggest a lozenge, and even 
that in a tone implying that it is the noise more 
than anything else she is anxious to get rid of. 

Poor little Angelina, too, sheds silent tears, for 



ON- BEING IN LOVE. 17 

Edwin has given up carrying her old handkerchief 
in the inside pocket of his waistcoat. 

Both are astonished at the falling off in the 
other one, but neither sees their own change. If 
they did, they would not suffer as they do. 
They would look for the cause in the right quar- 
ter — in the littleness of poor human nature — join 
hands over their common failing, and start build- 
ing their house anew on a more earthly and 
enduring foundation. But we are so blind to our 
own shortcomings, so wide awake to those of oth- 
ers. Everything that happens to us is always the 
other person's fault. Angelina would have gone 
on loving Edwin forever and ever and ever, if 
only Edwin had not grown so strange and differ- 
ent. Edwin would have adored Angelina through 
eternity, if Angelina had only remained the same 
as when he first adored her. 

It is a cheerless hour for you both, when the 
lamp of love has gone out, and the fire of affec- 
tion is not yet lit, and you have to grope about 
in the cold raw dawn of life to kindle it. God 
grant it catches light before the day is too far 
spent. Many sit shivering by the dead coals till 
night come. 



1^ ON BEIMG IN LOVE. 

But, there, of what use is it to preach? Who 
that feels the rush of young love through his 
veins can think it will ever flow feeble and slow ! 
To the boy of twenty, it seems impossible that 
he will not love as wildly at sixty as he does then. 
He cannot call to mind any middle-aged or 
elderly gentleman of his acquaintance who is 
known to exhibit symptoms of frantic attach- 
ment, but that does not interfere in his belief in 
himself. His love will never fail, whoever else's 
may. Nobody ever loved as he loves, and so, of 
course, the rest of the world's experience can be 
no guide in his case. Alas, alas! e'er thirty, he 
has joined the ranks of the sneerers. It is not 
his fault. Our passions, both the good and bad, 
cease with our blushes. We do not hate, nor 
grieve, nor joy, nor despair in our thirties like we 
did in our teens. Disappointment does not sug- 
gest suicide, and we quaff success without intoxi- 
cation. 

We take all things in a minor key as we grow 
older. There are few majestic passages in the 
later acts of life's opera. Ambition takes a less 
ambitious aim. Honor becomes more reasonable 
and conveniently adapts itself to circumstances. 



ON BEING IN LOVE. 1 9 

And love — love dies. "Irreverence for the 
dreams of youth" soon creeps like a killing frost 
upon our hearts. The tender shoots and the ex- 
panding flowers are nipped and withered, and, of 
a vine that yearned to stretch its tendrils round 
the world, there is left but a sapless stump. 

My fair friends will deem all this rank heresy, 
I know. So far from a man's not loving after he 
has passed boyhood, it is not till there is a good 
deal of gray in his hair that they think his pro- 
testations at all worthy of attention. Young 
ladies take their notions of our sex from the nov- 
els written by their own and, compared with the 
monstrosities that masquerade for men in the 
pages of that nightmare literature, Pythagoras's 
plucked bird and Frankenstein's demon were fair 
average specimens of humanity. 

In these so-called books, the chief lover, or 
Greek god, as he is admiringly referred to — by 
the way, they do not say which "Greek god" it is 
that the gentleman bears such a striking likeness 
to, it might be hump-backed Vulcan, or double- 
faced Janus, or even driveling Silenus, the god of 
abstruse mysteries. He resembles the whole 
family of them, however, in being a blackguard. 



20 ON BEING IN LOVE. 

and perhaps this is what is meant. To even the 
little manliness his classical prototypes possessed, 
though, he can lay no claim whatever, being a 
listless effeminate noodle, on the shady side of 
forty. But oh ! the depth and strength of this 
elderly party's emotion for some bread and butter 
school-girl! Hide your heads, ye young Romeos 
and Leanders, this blase old beau loves with an 
hysterical fervor that requires four adjectives to 
every noun to properly describe. 

It is well, dear ladies, for us old sinners, that 
you study only books. Did you read mankind, 
you would know that the lad's shy stammering 
tells a truer tale than our bold eloquence. A 
boy's love comes from a full heart ; a man's is 
more often the result of a full stomach. Indeed, 
a man's sluggish current may not be called love, 
compared with the rushing fountain that wells up, 
when a boy's heart is struck with the heavenly 
rod. If you would taste love, drink of the pure 
stream that youth pours out at your f«^et. Do 
not wait till it has become a muddy river before 
you stoop to catch its waves. 

Or is it that you like its bitter flavor; that the 
clear, limpid water is insipid to your palate and 



ON BEING IN LOVE. 21 

that the pollution of its after-course gives it a rel- 
ish to your lips? Must we believe those who tell 
us that a hand foul with the filth of a shameful 
life is the only one a young girl cares to be 
caressed by? 

That is the teaching that is bawled out day by 
day from between those yellow covers. Do they 
ever pause to think, I wonder, those Devil's 
Lady-Helps, what mischief they are doing crawl- 
ing about God's garden, and telling childish 
Eves and silly Adams that sin is sweet, and that 
decency is ridiculous and vulgar? How many an 
innocent girl do they not degrade into an evil- 
minded woman? To how many a weak lad do 
they not point out the dirty by-path as the short- 
est cut to a maiden's heart? It is not as if they 
wrote of life as it really is. Speak truth, and 
right will take care, of itself. But their pictures 
are coarse daubs painted from the sickly fancies 
of their own diseased imagination. 

We want to think of women not — as their own 
sex would show them — as Lorleis luring us to 
destruction, but as good angels beckoning us up- 
ward. They have more power for good or evil 
than they dream of. It is just at the very age 



22 ON BEING IN LOVE. 

when a man's character is forming that he tum- 
bles into love, and then the lass he loves has the 
making or marring of him. Unconsciously he 
molds himself to what she would have him, good 
or bad. I am sorry to have to be ungallant 
enough to say that I do not think they always 
use their influence for the best. Too often the 
female world is bounded hard and fast within the 
limits of the commonplace. Their ideal hero is a 
prince of littleness, and to become that many a 
powerful mind, enchanted by love, is "lost to life 
and use, and name and fame." 

And yet, women, you could make us so much 
better, if you only would. It rests with you, 
more than with all the preachers, to roll this 
world a little nearer Heaven. Chivalry is not 
dead : it only sleeps for want of work to do. It 
is you who must wake it to noble deeds. You 
must be worthy of knightly worship. 

You must be higher than ourselves. It was for 
Una that the Red Cross Knight did war. For 
no painted, mincing, court dame could the dragon 
have been slain. Oh, ladies fair, be fair in mind 
and soul as well as face, so that brave knights 
may win glory in your service ! Oh, Woman, 



ON BEING IN LOVE. 23 

throw off your disguising cloaks of selfishness, 
effrontery, and affectation ! Stand forth once 
more a queen in your royal robe of simple purity. 
A thousand swords, now rusting in ignoble sloth, 
shall leap from their scabbards to do battle for 
your honor against wrong. A thousand Sir 
Rolands shall lay lance in rest, and Fear, Avarice, 
Pleasure, and Ambition shall go down in the dust 
before your colors. 

What noble deeds were we not ripe for in the 
days when we loved? What noble lives could we 
not have lived for her sake? Our love was a 
religion we could have died for. It was no mere 
human creature like ourselves that we adored. 
It was a queen that we paid homage to, a god- 
dess that we worshiped. 

And how madly we did worship ! And how 
sweet it was to worship ! Ah, lad, cherish love's 
young dream while it lasts ! You will know, too 
soon, how truly little Tom Moore sang, when he 
said that there was nothing half so sweet in life. 
Even when it brings misery, it is a wild, romantic 
misery, all unlike the dull, worldly pain of after 
sorrows. When you have lost her — when the 
light is gone out from your life, iand the world 



24 ON BEING IN LOVE. 

stretches before you a long, dark horror, even 
then a half enchantment mingles with your 
despair. 

And who would not risk its terrors to gain its 
raptures? Ah, what raptures they were ! The 
mere recollection thrills you. How delicious it 
was to tell her that you loved her, that you lived 
for her, that you would die for her! How you 
did rave to be sure, what floods of extravagant 
nonsense you poured forth, and oh, how cruel it 
was of her to pretend not to believe you ! In 
what awe you stood of her! How miserable you 
were when you had offended her! And yet, how 
pleasant to be bullied by her, and to sue for par- 
don without having the slightest notion of what 
your fault was ! How dark the world was when 
she snubbed you, as she often did, the little 
rogue, just to see you look wretched; how sunny 
when she smiled ! How jealous you were of 
every one about her! How you hated every man 
she shook hands with, every woman she kissed — 
the maid that did her hair, the boy that cleaned 
her shoes, the dog she nursed — though you had 
to be respectful to the last-named ! How you 
looked forward to seeing her, how stupid you 



ON BEING IN LOVE. 25 

were when you did see her, staring at her without 
saying a word I How impossible it was for you 
to go out at any time of the day or night without 
finding yourself eventually opposite her windows ! 
You hadn't pluck enough to go in, but you hung 
about the corner and gazed at the outside. Oh, 
if the house had only caught fire — it was insured, 
so it wouldn't have mattered — and you could 
have rushed in and saved her at the risk of your 
life, and have been terribly burnt and injured ! 
Anything to serve her. Even in little things 
that was so sweet. How you would watch her, 
spaniel-like, to anticipate her slightest wish ! 
How proud you were to do her bidding! How 
delightful it was to be ordered about by her! 
To devote your whole life to her, and to never 
think of yourself, seemed such a simple thing. 
You would go without a holiday to lay a humble 
offering at her shrine, and felt more than repaid 
if she only deigned to accept it. How precious 
to you was everything that she had hallowed by 
her touch — her little glove, the ribbon she had 
worn, the rose that had nestled in her hair, and 
whose withered leaves still mark the poems you 
never care to look at now. 



26 ON BEING IN LOVE. 

And oh, how beautiful she was, how wondrous 
beautiful ! It was as some angel entering the 
room, and all else became plain and earthly. She 
was too sacred to be touched. It seemed almost 
presumption to gaze at her. You would as soon 
have thought of kissing her as of singing comic 
songs in a cathedral. It was desecration enough 
to kneel, and timidly raise the gracious little 
hand to your lips. 

Ah, those foolish days, those foolish days, 
when we were unselfish, and pure-minded ; those 
foolish days, when our simple hearts were full of 
truth, and faith, and reverence ! Ah, those fool- 
ish days of noble longings and of noble strivings ! 
And oh, these wise clever days, when w^e know 
that money is the only prize worth striving for, 
when we believe in nothing else but meanness 
and lies, when we care for no living creature but 
ourselves ! 



ON BEING IN THE BLUES, 

T CAN enjoy feeling melancholy, and there is 
-*" a good deal of satisfaction about being thor- 
oughly miserable ; but nobody likes a fit of the 
blues. Nevertheless, everybody has them ; not- 
withstanding which, nobody can tell why. There 
is no accounting for them. You are just as likely 
to have one on the day after you have come into 
a large fortune, as on the day after you have left 
your new silk umbrella in the train. Its effect 
upon you is somewhat similar to what would 
probably be produced by a combined attack of 
toothache, indigestion, and cold in the head. 
You become stupid, restless, and irritable; rude 
to strangers, and dangerous toward your friends ; 
clumsy, maudlin, and quarrelsome ; a nuisance to 
yourself, and everybody about you. 

While it is on, you can do nothing and think 
of nothing, though feeling at the time bound 
to do something. You can't sit still, so put on 
your hat and go for a walk , but before you get 

27 



28 ON BEING IN THE BLUES. 

to the corner of the street you wish you hadn't 
come out, and you turn back. You open a book 
and try to read, but you find Shakespeare trite 
and commonplace, Dickens is dull and prosy, 
Thackeray a bore, and Carlyle too sentimental. 
You throw the book aside, and call the author 
names. Then you *' shoo " the cat out of the 
room, and kick the door to after her. You think 
you will write your letters, but after sticking at 
'* Dearest Au?itie, — / find I have five mmutes to 
spare, and so hasten to write to you,'' for a quarter 
of an hour, without being able to think of an- 
other sentence, you tumble the paper into the 
desk, fling the wet pen down upon the table- 
cloth, and start up with the resolution of going 
to see the Thompsons. While pulling on your 
gloves, however, it occurs to you that the 
Thompsons are idiots ; that they never have 
supper ; and that you will be expected to jump 
the baby. You curse the Thompsons, and de- 
cide not to go. 

By this time you feel completely crushed. 
You bury your face in your hands, and think you 
would like to die and go to heaven. You picture 
to yourself your own sick-bed, with all your 



ON BEING IN THE BLUES, 29 

friends and relations standing round you weep- 
ing. You bless them all, especially the young 
and pretty ones. They will value you when you 
are gone, so you say to yourself, and learn too 
late what they have lost ; and you bitterly con- 
trast their presumed regard for you then with 
their decided want of veneration now. 

These reflections make you feel a little more 
cheerful, but only for a brief period ; for the next 
moment you think what a fool you must be to 
imagine for an instant that anybody would be 
sorry at anything that might happen to you. 
Who would care two straws (whatever precise 
amount of care two straws may represent) whether 
you were blown up, or hung up, or married, or 
drowned. Nobody cares for you. You never 
have been properly appreciated, never met with 
your due deserts in any one particular. You 
review the whole of your past life, and it is pain- 
fully apparent that you have been ill-used from 
your cradle. 

Half an hour's indulgence in these considera- 
tions works you up into a state of savage fury 
against everybody and everything, especially your- 
self, whom anatomical reasons alone prevent your 



30 On being in the bLuEs. 

kicking. Bed-time at last comes, to save you 
from doing something rash, and you spring up- 
stairs, throw off your clothes, leaving them strewn 
all over the room, blow out the candle, and jump 
into bed as if you had backed yourself for a heavy 
wager to do the whole thing against time. There, 
you toss and tumble about for a couple of hours 
or so, varying the monotony by occasionally jerk- 
ing the clothes off, and getting out and putting 
them on again. At length you drop into an un- 
easy and fitful slumber, have bad dreams, and 
wake up late the next morning. 

At least, this is all we poor single men can do 
under the circumstances. Married men bully 
their wives, grumble at the dinner, and insist on 
the children's going to bed. All of which, creat- 
ing, as it does, a good deal of disturbance in the 
house, must be a great relief to the feelings of a 
man in the blues, rows being the only form 
of amusement in which he can take any in- 
terest. 

The symptoms of the infirmity are much the 
same in every case, but the affliction itself is vari- 
ously termed. The poet says that **a feeling of 
sadness comes o'er him." 'Arry refers to the 



av BEING IN THE BLUES. 3 1 

heavings of his wayward heart by confiding to 
Jimee that he has "got the blooming hump." 
Your sister doesn't know what is the matter with 
her to-night. She feels out of sorts altogether, 
and hopes nothing is going to happen. The 
everyday-young-man is **so awfully glad to meet 
you, old fellow," for he does "feel so jolly misera- 
ble, this evening." As for myself, I generally say 
that "I have a strange, unsettled feeling to-night," 
and "think I'll go out." 

By the way, it never does come except in the 
evening. In the sun-time, when the world is 
bounding forward full of life, we cannot stay to 
sigh and sulk. The roar of the working day 
drowns the voices of the elfin sprites that are ever 
singing their low-toned miserere in our ears. In 
the day we are angry, disappointed, or indignant, 
but never "in the blues," and never melancholy. 
When things go wrong at lo o'clock in the morn- 
ing, we — or rather you — swear and knock the fur- 
niture about ; but if the misfortune comes at 
lo P.M., we read poetry, or sit in the dark, and 
think what a hollow world this is. 

But, as a rule, it is not trouble that makes us 
melancholy. The actuality is too stern a thing 



32 ON BEING IN THE BLUES. 

for sentiment. We linger to weep over a picture, 
but from the original we should quickly turn our 
eyes away. There is no pathos in real misery : 
no luxury in real grief. We do not toy with sharp 
swords, nor hug a gnawing fox to our breasts for 
choice. When a man or woman loves to brood 
over a sorrow, and takes care to keep it green in 
their memory, you may be sure it is no longer a 
pain to them. However they may have suffered 
from it at first, the recollection has become by 
then a pleasure. Many dear old ladies, who daily 
look at tiny shoes, lying in lavender-scented draw- 
ers, and weep as they think of the tiny feet whose 
toddling march is done ; and sweet-faced young 
ones, w^ho place each night beneath their pillow 
some lock that once curled on a boyish head that 
the salt waves have kissed to death, will call me a 
nasty cynical brute, and say I'm talking non- 
sense; but I believe, nevertheless, that if they will 
ask themselves truthfully whether they find it un- 
pleasant to dwell thus on their sorrow, they will be 
compelled to answer "No." Tears are as sweet 
as laughter to some natures. The proverbial Eng- 
lishman, we know from old chronicler Froissart, 
takes his pleasures sadly, and the Englishwoman 



ON BEING IN THE BLUES. Z2» 

goes a step further, and takes her pleasures in sad- 
ness itself. 

I am not sneering. I would not for a moment 
sneer at anything that helps to keep hearts ten- 
der in this hard old world. We men are cold and 
common-sensed enough for all ; we would not 
have women the same. No, no, ladies dear, be 
always sentimental and soft-hearted, as you are — 
be the soothing butter to our coarse dry bread. 
Besides, sentiment is to women what fun is to us. 
They do not care for our humor, surely it would 
be unfair to deny them their grief. And who 
shall say that their mode of enjoyment is not as 
sensible as ours? Why assume that a doubled-up 
body, a contorted, purple face, and a gaping 
mouth, emitting a series of ear-splitting shrieks, 
point to a state of more intelligent happiness than 
a pensive face, reposing upon a little white hand, 
and a pair of gentle tear-dimmed eyes, looking 
back through Time's dark avenue upon a fading 
past? 

I am glad when I see Regret walked with as a 
friend — glad because I know the saltness has been 
washed from out the tears, and that the sting 
must have been plucked from the beautiful face 



34 ON BEING IN THE BLUES. 

of Sorrow e*er we dare press her pale lips to ours. 
Time has laid his healing hand upon the wound, 
when we can look back upon the pain we once 
fainted under, and no bitterness or despair rises 
in our hearts. The burden is no longer heavy, 
when we have for our past troubles only the same 
sweet mingling of pleasure and pity that we feel 
when old knight-hearted Colonel Newcome an- 
swers "adsum" to the great roll-call, or when Tom 
and Maggie Tulliver, clasping hands through the 
mists that have divided them, go down, locked in 
each other's arms, beneath the swollen waters of 
the Floss. 

Talking of poor Tom and Maggie Tulliver 
brings to my mind a saying of George Eliot's in 
connection with this subject of melancholy. She 
speaks somewhere of the "sadness of a summer's 
evening." How wonderfully true — like every- 
thing that came from that wonderful pen — the 
observation is! Who has not felt the sorrowful 
enchantment of those lingering sunsets? The 
world belongs to Melancholy, then a thoughtful 
deep-eyed maiden who loves not the glare of day. 
It is not till "light thickens, and the crow wings 
to the rocky wood," that she steals forth from her 



ON BEING IN THE BLUES. 35 

groves. Her palace is in twilight land. It is 
there she meets us. At her shadowy gate she 
takes our hand in hers, and walks besides us 
through her mystic realm. We see no form, but 
seem to hear the rustling of her wings. 

Even in the toiling hum-drum city, her spirit 
comes to us. There is a somber presence in each 
long, dull street ; and the dark river creeps ghost- 
like, under the black arches, as if bearing some 
hidden secret beneath its muddy waves. 

In the silent country, when the trees and hedges 
loom dim and blurred against the rising night, and 
the bat's wing flutters in our face, and the land- 
rail's cry sounds drearily across the fields, the spell 
sinks deeper still into our hearts. We seem in 
that hour to be standing by some unseen death- 
bed, and in the swaying of the elms we hear the 
sigh of the dying day. 

A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is 
around us. In its light, our cares of the working 
day grow small and trivial, and bread and cheese — " 
aye, and even kisses — do not seem the only things 
worth striving for. Thoughts we cannot speak 
but only listen to flood in upon us, and, standing 
in the stillness under earth's darkening dome, we 



36 ON BEING IN THE BLUES. 

feel that we are greater than our petty lives. 
Hung round with those dusky curtains, the world 
is no longer a mere dingy workshop, but a stately 
temple wherein man may worship, and where, at 
times, in the dimness, his groping hands touch 
God's. 



ON BEING HARD UP. 

T T is a most remarkable thing. I sat down 
-■- with the full intention of writing something 
clever and original ; but for the life of me I can't 
think of anything clever and original — at least, 
not at this moment. The only thing I can think 
about now is being hard up. I suppose having 
my hands in my pockets has made me think 
about this. I always do sit with my hands in 
my pockets, except when I am in the company 
of my sisters, my cousins, or my aunts ; and they 
kick up such a shindy — I should say expostulate 
so eloquently upon the subject — that I have to 
give in and take them out — my hands I mean. 
The chorus to their objections is that it is not 
gentlemanly. I am hanged if I can see why. I 
could understand its not being considered gentle- 
manly to put your hands in other people's 
pockets (especially by the other people), but how, 
O ye sticklers for what looks this and what looks 
that, can putting his hands in his own pockets 

37 



38 ON BEING HARD UP. 

make a man less gentle ! Perhaps you are right, 
though. Now I come to think of it, I have heard 
some people grumble most savagely when doing 
it. But they were mostly old gentlemen. We 
young fellows, as a rule, are never quite at ease 
unless we have our hands in our pockets. We 
are awkward and shifty. We are like what a 
music-hall Lion Comique would be without his 
opera hat, if such a thing can be imagined. But 
let us put our hands in our trousers' pockets, and 
let there be some small change in the right hand 
one and a bunch of keys in the left, and we will 
face a female post-ofifice clerk. 

It is a little difficult to know what to do with 
your hands, even in your pockets, when there is 
nothing else there. Years ago, when my whole 
capital would occasionally come down to ''what 
in town the people call a bob," I would reck- 
lessly spend a penny of it, merely for the sake of 
having the change, all in coppers, to jingle. You 
don't feel nearly so hard up with elevenpence in 
your pocket as you do with a shilling. Had I 
been " La-di-da," that impecunious youth about 
whom we superior folk are so sarcastic, I would 
have changed my penny for two ha'pennies. 



ON BEING HARD UP. 39 

I can speak with authority on the subject of 
being hard up. I have been a provincial actor. 
If further evidence be required, which I do not 
think likely, I can add that I have been a " gen- 
tleman connected with the press." I have lived 
on fifteen shillings a week. I have lived a week 
on ten, owing the other five ; and I have lived 
for a fortnight on a greatcoat. 

It is wonderful what an insight into domestic 
economy being really hard up gives one. If you 
want to find out the value of money, live on 
fifteen shillings a week, and see how much you 
can put by for clothes and recreation. You will 
find out that it is worth while to wait for the 
farthing change, that it is worth while to walk a 
mile to save a penny, that a glass of beer is a 
luxury to be indulged in only at rare intervals, 
and that a collar can be worn for four days. 

Try it just before you get married. It will be 
excellent practice. Let your son and heir try it 
before sending him to college. He wont grum- 
ble at a hundred a year pocket-money then. 
There are some people to whom it would do a 
world of good. There is that delicate blossom, 
who can't drink any claret under ninety-four, and 



40 ON BEING HARD UP. 

who would as soon think of dining off cats' meat 
as off plain roast mutton. You do come across 
these poor wretches now and then, though, to 
the credit of humanity, they are principally con- 
fined to that fearful and wonderful society known 
only to lady novelists. I never hear of one of 
these creatures discussing a menu card, but I feel 
a mad desire to drag him off to the bar of some 
common east-end public-house, and cram a six- 
penny dinner down his throat — beefsteak pud- 
ding, fourpence ; potatoes, a penny ; half a pint 
of porter, a penny. The recollection of it (and 
the mingled fragrance of beer, tobacco, and roast 
pork generally leaves a vivid impression) might 
induce him to turn up his nose a little less fre- 
quently in the future at everything that is put 
before him. Then, there is that generous party, 
the cadger's delight, who is so free with his small 
change, but who never thinks of paying his debts. 
It might teach even him a little common sense. 
" I always give the waiter a shilling. One can't 
give the fellow less, you know," explained a 
young Government clerk with whom I was lunch- 
ing the other day in Regent Street. I agreed 
with him as to the utter impossibility of making 



ON BEING HARD UP. 41 

it elevenpence ha'penny ; but, at the same time, 
I resolved to one day decoy him to an eating- 
house I remembered near Covent Garden, where 
the waiter, for the better discharge of his duties, 
goes about in his shirt sleeves — and very dirty 
sleeves they are too, when it gets near the end of 
the month. I know that waiter. If my friend 
gives him anything beyond a penny, the man will 
insist on shaking hands with him then and there, 
as a mark of his esteem ; of that I feel sure. 

There have been a good many funny things 
said and written about hardupishness, but the 
reality is not funny, for all that. It is not funny 
to have to haggle over pennies. It isn't funny to 
be thought mean and stingy. It isn't funny to be 
shabby, and to be ashamed of your address. No, 
there is nothing at all funny in poverty — to the 
poor. It is hell upon earth to a sensitive man ; 
and many a brave gentleman, who would have 
faced the labors of Hercules, has had his heart 
broken by its petty miseries. 

It is not the actual discomforts themselves that 
are hard to bear. Who would mind roughing it 
a bit, if that were all it meant? What cared 
Robinson Crusoe for a patch on his trousers? — 



42 ON BEING HARD UP. 

Did he wear trousers? I forget; or did he go 
about as he does in the pantomimes? What did 
it matter to him if his toes did stick out of his 
boots? and what if his umbrella was a cotton one, 
so long as it kept the rain off. His shabbiness 
did not trouble him : there were none of his friends 
round about to sneer at him. 

Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known 
to be poor that is the sting. It is not cold that 
makes a man without a greatcoat hurry along so 
quickly. It is not all shame at telling lies — which 
he knows will not be believed — that makes him 
turn so red when he informs you that he con- 
siders greatcoats unhealthy, and never carries an 
umbrella on principle. It is easy enough to say 
that poverty is no crime. No ; if it were men 
would'nt be ashamed of it. It's a blunder though, 
and is punished as such. A poor man is despised 
the whole world over; despised as much by a 
Christian as by a lord, as much by a demagogue 
as by a footman, and not all the copy-book 
maxims ever set for ink-stained youth will make 
him respected. Appearances are everything, so 
far as human opinion goes, and the man who will 
walk down Piccadilly arm in arm with the most 



ON BEING HARD UP, 43 

notorious scamp in London, provided he is a well- 
dressed one, will slink up a back street to say a 
couple of words to a seedy-looking gentleman. 
And the seedy-looking gentleman knows this— 
no one better — and will go a mile round to avoid 
meeting an acquaintance. Those that knew him 
in his p osperity need never trouble themselves 
to look the other way. He is a thousand times 
more anxious that they should not see him than 
they can be ; and as to their assistance, there is 
nothing he dreads more than the offer of it. All 
he wants is to be forgotten ; and in this respect he 
is generally fortunate enough to get what he 
wants. 

One becomes used to being hard up, as one be- 
comes used to everything else, by the help of that 
wonderful old homoeopathic doctor, Time. You 
can tell at a glance the difference between the old 
hand and the novice ; between the case-hardened 
man who has been used to shift and struggle for 
years, and the poor devil of a beginner, striving 
to hide his misery, and in a constant agony of fear 
lest he should be found out. Nothing shows this 
difference more clearly than the way in which 
each will pawn his watch. As the poet says some- 



44 ON BEING HARD UP. 

where: "True ease in pawning comes from art, 
not chance." The one goes into his "Uncle's" 
with as much composure as he would into his 
tailor's — very likely with more. The assistant is 
even civil and attends to him at once to the great 
indignation of the lady in the next box, who, how- 
ever, sarcastically observes that she don't mind 
being kept waiting "if it is a regular customer." 
Why, from the pleasant and business-like manner 
in which the transaction is carried out, it might 
be a large purchase in the Three per Cents. Yet 
what a piece of work a man makes of his first 
"pop." A boy popping his first question is con- 
fidence itself compared with him. He hangs 
about outside the shop, until he has succeeded in 
attracting the attention of all the loafers in the 
neighborhood, and has aroused strong suspicions 
in the mind of the policeman on the beat. At 
last, after a careful examination of the contents of 
the windows, made for the purpose of impressing 
the by-standers with the notion that he is going 
in to purchase a diamond bracelet or some such 
trifle, he enters, trying to do so with a careless 
swagger, and giving himself really the air of a 
member of the swell mob. When inside, he 



ON- BEING HARD UP. 45 

speaks in so low a voice as to be perfectly iriaudi- 
ble, and has to say it all over again. When, in 
the course of his rambling conversation about a 
•'friend" of his, the word "lend" is reached, he is 
promptly told to go up the court on the right, 
and take the first door round the corner. He 
comes out of the shop with a face that you could 
easily light a cigarette at, and firmly under the 
impression that the whole population of the dis- 
trict is watching him. When he does get to the 
right place he has forgotten his name and address, 
and is in a general condition of hopeless imbecility. 
Asked in a severe tone how he came by "this," 
he stammers and contradicts himself, and it is 
only a miracle if he does not confess to having 
stolen it that very day. He is thereupon informed 
that they don't want anything to do with his sort, 
and that he had better get out of this as quickly 
as possible, which he does, recollecting nothing 
more until he finds himself three miles off, 
without the slightest knowledge how he got 
there. 

By the way, how awkward it is, though, having 
to depend on public-houses and churches for the 
time. The former are generally too fast, and the 



46 O.V BEING HARD UP. 

latter too slow. Besides which, your efforts to get 
a glimpse of the public-house clock from the out- 
side, are attended with great difificulties. If you 
gently push the swing door ajar and peer in, you 
draw upon yourself the contemptuous looks of the 
barmaid, who at once puts you down in the same 
category with area sneaks and cadgers. You also 
create a certain amount of agitation among the 
married portion of the customers. You don't see 
the clock, because it is behind the door: and in 
trying to withdraw quietly you jamb your head. 
The only other method is to jump up and down 
outside the window. After this latter proceed- 
ing, however, if you do not bring out a banjo and 
commence to sing, the youthful inhabitants of the 
neighborhood, who have gathered round in ex- 
pectation, become disappointed. 

I should like to know, too, by what mysterious 
law of nature it is that, before you have left your 
watch "to be repaired" half-an-hour, some one is 
sure to stop you in the street and conspicuously 
ask you the time. Nobody even feels the 
slightest curiosity on the subject when you've got 
it on. 

Dear old ladies and gentlemen, who know noth- 



ON BEING HARD UP. 47 

ing about being hard up — and may they never, 
bless their gray old heads — look upon the pawn- 
shop as the last stage of degradation ; but those 
who know it better (and my readers have, no 
doubt, noticed this themselves), are often sur- 
prised, like the little boy who dreamed he went to 
Heaven, at meeting so many people there that 
they never expected to see. For my part, I think 
it a much more independent course than borrow- 
ing from friends, and I always try to impress this 
upon those of my acquaintance who incline to- 
ward "wanting a couple of pounds till the day 
after to-morrow." But they wont all see it. One 
of them once remarked that he objected to the 
principle of the thing. I fancy if he had said it 
was the interest that he objected to he would 
have been nearer the truth: twenty-five per cent, 
certainly does come heavy. 

There are degrees in being hard up. We are 
all hard up, more or less — most of us more. Some 
are hard up for a thousand pounds ; some for a 
shilling. Just at this moment I am hard up my- 
self for a fiver. I only want it for a day or two. 
I should be certain of paying it back within a 
week at the outside, and if any lady or gentleman 



4^ OX BEJNG HARD UP. 

among my readers would kindly lend it me, I 
should be very much obliged indeed. They could 
send it to me, under cover to Messrs. Field and 
Tuer, only, in such case, please let the envelope 
be carefully sealed. I would give you my I.O.U. 
as security. 



ON VANITY AND VANITIES, 

A LL is vanity, and everybody's vain. Wo- 
'^ ^ men are terribly vain. So are men — 
more so, if possible. So are children, particu- 
larly children. One of them, at this very 
moment, is hammering upon my legs. She 
wants to know what I think of her new shoes. 
Candidly I don't think much of them. They 
lack symmetry and curve, and possess an inde- 
scribable appearance of lumpiness (I believe, too, 
they've put them on the wrong feet). But I 
don't say this. It is not criticism, but flattery 
that she wants ; and I gush over them with what 
I feel to myself to be degrading effusiveness. 
Nothing else would satisfy this self-opinionated 
cherub. I tried the conscientious friend dodge 
with her on one occasion, but it was not a 
success. She had requested my judgment upon 
her general conduct and behavior, the exact case 
submitted being : " Wot oo tink of me ? Oo 
peased wi* me?" and I had thought it a good 

do 



^0 OAT VANITY AND VANITIES. 

opportunity to make a few salutory remarks 
upon her late moral career, and said: *' No, I 
am not pleased with you." I recalled to her 
mind the events of that very morning, and I put 
it to her how she, as a Christian child, could 
expect a wise and good uncle to be satisfied with 
the carryings on of an infant who that very day 
had roused the whole house at 5 A.M. ; had upset 
a water jug, and tumbled downstairs after it at 
7; had endeavored to put the cat in the bath at 
8 ; and sat on her own father's hat at 9:35. 

What did she do ? Was she grateful to me 
for my plain speaking ? Did she ponder upon 
my words, and determine to profit by them, and 
to lead, from that hour, a better and nobler life ? 

No ! she howled. 

That done, she became abusive. She said : 

" Oo naughty — 00 naughty, bad unkie — 00 bad 
man— me tell MAR." 

And she did, too. 

Since then, when my views have been called 
for, I have kept my real sentiments more to 
myself like, preferring to express unbounded 
admiration of this young person's actions, irre- 
spective of their actual merits. And she nods 



ON VANITY AND VANITIES. 5 1 

her head approvingly, and trots off to advertise 
my opinion to the rest of the household. She 
appears to employ it as a sort of testimonial for 
mercenary purposes, for I subsequently hear 
distant sounds of ** Unkie says me dood dirl — 
me dot to have two bikkies." * 

There she goes, now, gazing rapturously at her 
own toes, and murmuring " pittie " — two-foot- 
ten of conceit and vanity ; to say nothing of other 
wickednesses. 

They are all alike. I remember sitting in a 
garden one sunny afternoon in the suburbs of 
London. Suddenly I heard a shrill, treble voice 
calling from a top story window to some unseen 
being, presumably in one of the other gardens, 
"Gamma, me dood boy, me wery good boy. 
Gamma; me dot on Bob's knickiebockies." 

Why, even animals are vain. I saw a great 
Newfoundland dog, the other day, sitting in front 
of a mirror at the entrance to a shop in Regent's 
Circus, and examining himself with an amount of 
smug satisfaction that I have never seen equaled 
elsewhere, outside a vestry meeting. 

* Early English for biscuits. 



52 ON VANITY AND VANITIES. 

I was at a farmhouse once, when some high 
holiday was being celebrated. I don't remember 
what the occasion was, but it was something fes- 
tive, a May-day or Quarter-day, or something of 
that sort, and they put a garland of flowers round 
the head of one of the cows. Well, that absurd 
quadruped went about all day as perky as a 
school-girl in a new frock; and, when they took 
the wreath off, she became quite sulky, and 
they had to put it on again before she would 
stand still to be milked. This is not a Percy 
anecdote. It is plain, sober truth. 

As for cats, they nearly equal human beings for 
vanity. I have known a cat get up and walk out 
of the room, on a remark derogatory to her spe- 
cies being made by a visitor, while a neatly turned 
compliment will set them purring for an hour. 

I do like cats. They are so unconsciously 
amusing. There is such a comic dignity about 
them, such an "How dare you !" "Go away, 
don't touch me" sort of air. Now there is noth- 
ing haughty about a dog. They are "Hail, fel- 
low, well met" with every Tom, Dick, or Harry 
that they come across. When I meet a dog of 
my acquaintance, I slap his head, call him oppro- 



ON VANITY AND VANITIES. 53 

brious epithets, and roll him over on his back ; and 
there he lies, gaping at me, and doesn't mind it a bit. 
Fancy carrying on like that with a cat ! Why, 
she would never speak to you again as long as 
you lived. No, when you want to win the appro- 
bation of a cat you must mind what you are 
about, and^work your way carefully. If you 
don't know the cat, you had best begin by say- 
ing, "Poor pussy." After which, add, "did 'ums," 
in a tone of soothing sympathy. You don't 
know what you mean, any more than the cat 
does, but the sentiment seems to imply a proper 
spirit on your part, and generally touches her 
feelings to such an extent that, if you are of good 
manners and passable appearance, she will stick 
her back up and rub her nose against you. Mat- 
ters having reached this stage, you may venture 
to chuck her under the chin, and tickle the side 
of her head, and the intelligent creature will then 
stick her claws into your legs; and all is friend- 
ship and affection, as so sweetly expressed in the 
beautiful lines — 

I love little Pussy, her coat is so warm, 

And if I don't tease her, she'll do me no harm ; 

So I'll stroke her, and pat her, and feed her with food, 

And Pussy will love me because I am good. 



54 ON VANITY AND VANITIES. 

The last two lines of the stanza give us a 
pretty true insight into pussy's notions of human 
goodness. It is evident that in her opinion good- 
ness consists of stroking her, and patting her, and 
feeding her with food. I fear this narrow- 
minded view of virtue, though, is not confined to 
pussies. We are all inclined to adopt a similar 
standard of merit in our estimate of other people. 
A good man is a man who is good to us, and a 
bad man is a man who doesn't do what we want 
him to. The truth is, we each of us have an 
inborn conviction that the whole world, with 
everybody and everything in it, was created as a 
sort of necessary appendage to ourselves. Our 
fellow men and women were made to admire us, 
and to minister to our various requirements. 
You and I, dear reader, are each the center of the 
universe in our respective opinions. You, as I 
understand it, were brought into being by a con- 
siderate Providence in order that you might read 
and pay me for what I write; while I, in your 
opinion, am an article sent into the world to 
write something for you to read. The stars — as 
we term the myriad other worlds that are rushing 
4Qwn beside us through the eternal silence — were 



ON VANITY AND VANITIES. 55 

put into the heavens to make the sky look inter- 
esting for us at night. And the moon, with 
its dark mysteries and ever-hidden face, is an 
arrangement for us to flirt under. 

I fear we are most of us like Mrs. Poyser's ban- 
tam cock, who fancied the sun got up every 
morning to hear him crow. ** 'Tis vanity that 
makes the world go round." I don't believe any 
man ever existed without vanity, and, if he did, 
he would be an extremely uncomfortable person 
to have anything to do with. He would, of 
course, be a very good man, and we should 
respect him very much. He would be a very 
admirable man — a man to be put under a glass 
case, and shown round as a specimen — a man to 
be stuck upon a pedestal, and copied, like a 
school exercise — a man to be reverenced, but not 
a man to be loved, not a human brother whose 
hand we should care to grip. Angels may be 
very excellent sort of folk in their way, but we, 
poor mortals, in our present state, would prob- 
ably find them precious slow company. Even 
mere good people are rather depressing. It is in 
our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we 
touch one another, and find sympathy. We 



56 OjV fan/ TV AND VANITIES. 

differ widely enough in our nobler qualities. It 
is in our follies that we are at one. Some of us 
are pious, some of us are generous. Some few of 
us are honest, comparatively speaking; and some, 
fewer still, may possibly be truthful. But in 
vanity and kindred weaknesses we can all join 
hands. Vanity is one of those touches of Nature 
that make the whole world kin. From the In- 
dian hunter, proud of his belt of scalps, to the 
European general, swelling beneath his row cf 
stars and medals; from the Chinese, gleeful at 
the length of his pigtail, to the "professional 
beauty," sufTering tortures in order that her waist 
may resemble a peg-top; from draggle-tailed little 
Polly Stiggins, strutting through Seven Dials 
with a tattered parasol over her head, to the 
princess, sweeping through a drawing-room, with 
a train of four yards long ; from 'Arry, winning 
by vulgar chaff the loud laughter of his pals, to 
the statesman, whose ears are tickled by the 
cheers that greet his high-sounding periods ; from 
the dark-skinned African, bartering his rare oils 
and ivory for a few glass beads to hang about his 
neck, to the Christian maiden, selling her white 
body for a score of tiny stones and an empty 



ON VANITY AND VANITIES. 57 

title to tack before her name — all march, and 
fight, and bleed, and die beneath its tawdry flag. 

Ay, ay, vanity is truly the motive-power that 
moves Humanity, and it is flattery that greases 
the wheels. If you want to win affection and 
respect in this world, you must flatter people. 
Flatter high and low, and rich and poor, and silly 
and wise. You will get on famously. Praise this 
man's virtues and that man's vices. Compliment 
everybody upon everything, and especially upon 
what they haven't got. Admire guys for their 
beauty, fools for their wit, and boors for their 
breeding. Your discernment and intelligence 
will be extolled to the skies. 

Every one can be got over by flattery. The 
belted earl — "belted earl" is the correct phrase, I 
believe. I don't know what it means, unless it 
be an earl that wears a belt instead of braces. 
Some men do. I don't like it myself. You 
have to keep the thing so tight, for it to be of 
any use, and that is uncomfortable. Anyhow, 
whatever particular kind of an earl a belted earl 
may be, he is, I assert, get-overable by flattery; 
just as every other human being is, from a duch- 
ess to a cat's-meat man, from a plowboy to a 



5 8 ON VANITY AND VANITIES 

poet — and the poet far easier than the plowboy, 
for butter sinks better into wheaten bread than 
into oaten cakes. 

As for love, flattery is its very life blood. Fill 
a person with love for themselves, and what runs 
over will be your share, says a certain witty and 
truthful Frenchman, whose name I can't for the 
life of me remember. (Confound it, I never can 
remember names when I want to.) Tell a girl 
she is an angel, only more angelic than an angel ; 
that she is a goddess, only more graceful, 
queenly, and heavenly than the average goddess ; 
that she is more fairy-like than Titania, more 
beautiful than Venus, more enchanting than Par- 
thenope ; more adorable, lovely, and radiant, in 
short, than any other woman that ever did live, 
does live or could live, and you will make a very 
favorable impression upon her trusting little 
heart. Sweet innocent ! she will believe every 
word you say. It is so easy to deceive a woman — 
in this way. 

Dear little souls, they hate flattery, so they tell 
you ; and, when you say, '' Ah, darling, it isn't 
flattery in your case, it's plain, sober truth ; you 
really are, without exaggeration, the most beauti- 



ON VANITY AND VANITIES. 59 

ful, the most good, the most charming, the most 
divine, the most perfect human creature that 
ever trod this earth," they will smile a quiet, 
approving smile, and, leaning against your manly 
shoulder, murmur that you are a dear good fellow 
after all. 

By Jove, fancy a man trying to make love on 
strictly truthful principles, determining never to 
utter a word of mere compliment or hyperbole, 
but to scrupulously confine himself to exact fact! 
Fancy his gazing rapturously into his mistress's 
eyes, and whispering softly to her that she 
wasn't, on the whole, bad-looking, as girls went ! 
Fancy his holding up her little hand, and assuring 
her that it was of a light drab color, shot with 
red ; and telling her, as he pressed her to his 
heart, that her nose, for a turned-up one, seemed 
rather pretty ; and that her eyes appeared to 
him, as far as he could judge, to be quite up to 
the average standard of such things ! 

A nice chance he would stand against the man 
who would tell her that her face was like a fresh 
blush rose, that her hair was a wandering sun- 
beam imprisoned by her smiles, and her eyes like 
two evening stars. 



6o ON VANITY .IND VANITIES. 

There are various ways of flattering, and, of 
course, you must adapt your style to your sub- 
ject. Some people like it laid on with a trowel, 
and this requires very little art. With sensible 
persons, however, it needs to be done very deli- 
cately, and more by suggestion than actual 
words. A good many like it wrapped up in the 
form of an insult, as — " Oh, you are a perfect 
fool, you are. You would give your last sixpence 
to the first hungry-looking beggar you met "; 
while others will swallow it only when admin- 
istered through the medium of a third person, so 
that if C wishes to get at an A of this sort, he 
must confide to A's particular friend B that he 
thinks A a splendid fellow, and beg him, B, not 
to mention it, especially to A. Be careful that B 
is a reliable man, though, otherwise he won't. 

Those fine, sturdy John Bulls, who " hate flat- 
tery, sir," '' Never let anybody get over Die by 
flattery," etc, etc., are very simply managed. 
Flatter them enough upon their absence of 
vanity, and you can do what you like with them. 

After all, vanity is as much a virtue as a vice. 
It is easy to recite copy-book maxims against its 
sinfulness, but it is a passion that can move us 



ON VANITY AND VANITIES. 6 1 

to good as well as to evil. Ambition is only 
vanity ennobled. We want to win praise and 
admiration — or Fame as we prefer to name it — 
and so we write great books, and paint grand 
pictures, and sing sweet songs ; and toil with 
willing hands in study, loom, and laboratory. 

We wish to become rich men, not in order to 
enjoy ease and comfort — all that any one man 
can taste of those may be purchased anywhere 
for two hundred pounds per annum — but that 
our houses may be bigger and more gaudily 
furnished than our neighbors' ; that our horses 
and servants may be more numerous ; that we 
may dress our wives and daughters in absurd, but 
expensive clothes ; and that we may give costly 
dinners of which we ourselves individually do 
not eat a shilling's worth. And to do this, we 
aid the world's work with clear and busy brain, 
spreading commerce among its peoples, carrying 
civilization to its remotest corners. 

Do not let us abuse vanity, therefore. Rather 
let us use it. Honor itself is but the highest form 
of vanity. The instinct is not confined solely to 
Beau Brummels and Dolly Vardens. There is 
the vanity of the peacock, and the vanity of the 



62 ON VANITY AND VANITIES. 

eagle. Snobs are vain. But so, too, are heroes. 
Come, oh ! my young brother bucks, let us be 
vain together. Let us join hands, and help each 
other to increase our vanity. Let us be vain, 
not of our trousers and hair, but of brave hearts 
and working hands, of truth, of purity, of 
nobility. Let us be too vain to stoop to aught 
that is mean or base, too vain for petty selfish- 
ness and little-minded envy, too vain to say an 
unkind word or do an unkind act. Let us be 
vain of being single-hearted, upright gentlemen 
in the midst of a world of knaves. Let us pride 
ourselves upon thinking high thoughts, achieving 
great deeds, living good lives. 



ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD, 

"NT OT exactly the sort of thing for an idle 
^ ^ fellow to think about, is it ? But outsiders, 
you know, often see most of the game ; and 
sitting in my arbor by the wayside, smoking my 
hookah of contentment, and eating the sweet 
lotus-leaves of indolence, I can look out 
musingly upon the whirling throng that rolls 
and tumbles past me on the great highroad of 
life. 

Never-ending is the wild procession. Day and 
night you can hear the quick tramp of the my- 
riad feet — some running, some walking, some 
halting and lame ; but all hastening, all eager in 
the feverish race, all straining life and limb and 
heart and soul to reach the ever-receding horizon 
of success. 

Mark them as they surge along — men and 
women, old and young, gentle and simple, fair 
and foul, rich and poor, merry and sad — all hurry- 
ing, bustling, scrambling. The strong pushing 

63 



64 ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD. 

aside the weak, the cunning creeping past the 
foolish ; those behind elbowing those before ; 
those in front kicking, as they run, at those 
behind. Look close, and see the flitting show. 
Here is an old man panting for breath ; and there 
a timid maiden, driven by a hard and sharp- 
faced matron ; here is a studious youth, reading 
" How to get on in the World," and letting 
everybody pass him as he stumbles along with 
his eyes on his book ; here is a bored-looking 
man, with a fashionably dressed woman jogging 
his elbow; here a boy gazing wistfully back at 
the sunny village that he never again will see ; 
here, with a firm and easy step, strides a broad- 
shouldered man ; and here, with stealthy tread, 
a thin-faced, stooping fellow dodges and shuffles 
upon his way ; here, with gaze fixed always on 
the ground, an artful rogue carefully works his 
way from side to side of the road, and thinks 
he is going forward ; and here a youth with a 
noble face stands, hesitating as he looks from the 
distant goal to the mud beneath his feet. 

And now into sight comes a fair girl, with her 
dainty face growing more wrinkled at every step ; 
and now a careworn man, and now a hopeful lad. 



ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD. 65 

A motley throng — a motley throng! Prince 
and beggar, sinner and saint, butcher and baker 
and candlestick-maker, tinkers and tailors, and 
plowboys and sailors — all jostling along to- 
gether. Here the counsel in his wig and gown, 
and here the old Jew clothesman under his dingy 
tiara ; here the soldier in his scarlet, and here the 
undertaker's mute in streaming hat-band and 
worn cotton gloves ; here the musty scholar, 
fumbling his faded leaves, and here the scented 
actor, dangling his showy seals. Here the glib 
politician, crying his legislative panaceas ; and 
here the peripatetic Cheap-Jack, holding aloft his 
quack cures for human ills. Here the sleek 
capitalist, and there the sinewy laborer ; here 
the man of science, and here the shoe-black ; 
here the poet, and here the water-rate col- 
lector ; here the cabinet minister, and there 
the ballet-dancer. Here a red-nosed publi- 
can, shouting the praises of his vats ; and here a 
temperance lecturer at fifty pounds a night; here 
a judge, and there a swindler ; here a priest, and 
there a gambler. Here a jewelled duchess, smil- 
ing and gracious ; here a thin lodging-house 
keeper, irritable with cooking ; and here a 



66 ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD. 

wabbling, strutting thing, tawdry in paint and 
finery. 

Cheek by cheek, they struggle onward. 
Screaming, cursing, and praying, laughing, sing- 
ing, and moaning, they rush past side by side. 
Their speed never slackens, the race never ends. 
There is no wayside rest for them, no halt by 
cooling fountains, no pause beneath green 
shades. On, on, on — on through the heat and 
the crowd and the dust — on, or they will be 
trampled down and lost — on, with throbbing 
brain and tottering limbs — on, till the heart 
grows sick, and the eyes grow blurred, and a 
gurgling groan tells those behind they may close 
up another space. 

And yet, in spite of the killing pace and the 
stony track, who, but the sluggard or the dolt, 
can hold aloof from the course ? Who — like the 
belated traveler that stands watching fairy rev- 
els till he snatches and drains the goblin cup, 
and springs into the whirling circle — can view 
the mad tumult, and not be drawn into its 
midst ? Not I, for one. I confess to the way- 
side arbor, the pipe of contentment, and the 
lotus-leaves being altogether unsuitable meta- 



ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD. 67 

phors. They sounded very nice and philosophical, 
but I'm afraid I am not the sort of person to sit 
in arbors, smoking pipes, when there is any fun 
going on outside. I think I more resemble the 
Irishman, who, seeing a crowd collecting, sent 
his little girl out to ask if there was going to be a 
row — '* 'Cos, if so, father would like to be in it." 

I love the fierce strife. I like to watch it. I 
like to hear of people getting on in it — battling 
their way bravely and fairly — that is, not slip- 
ping through by luck or trickery. It stirs one's 
old Saxon fighting blood, like the tales of 
" knights who fought 'gainst fearful odds " that 
thrilled us in our school-boy days. 

And fighting the battle of life is fighting 
against fearful odds, too. There are giants and 
dragons in this nineteenth century, and the gol- 
den casket that they guard is not so easy to win 
as it appears in the story-books. There, Alger- 
non takes one long, last look at the ancestral 
hall, dashes the tear-drop from his eye, and goes 
off — to return in three years' time, rolling in 
riches. The authors do not tell us "how it's 
done," which is a pity, for it would surely prove 
exciting. 



68 ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD. 

But then not one novelist in a thousand ever 
does tell us the real story of their hero. They 
linger for a dozen pages over a tea-party, but 
sum up a life's history with " he had become one 
of our merchant princes," or, *' he was now a 
great artist, with the world at his feet." Why, 
there is more real life in one of Gilbert's patter- 
songs than in half the biographical novels ever 
written. He relates to us all the various steps 
by which his ofifice-boy rose to be the "■ ruler of 
the Queen's navee," and explains to us Jiozv the 
briefless barrister managed to become a great 
and good judge, " ready to try this breach of 
promise of marriage." It is in the petty details, 
not in the great results, that the interest of ex- 
istence lies. 

What we really want is a novel showing us all 
the hidden under-current of an ambitious man's 
career — his struggles, and failures, and hopes, his 
disappointments, and victories. It would be an 
immense success. I am sure the wooing of For- 
tune would prove quite as interesting a tale as 
the wooing of any flesh and blood maiden, 
though, by-the-way, it would read extremely 
similar; for Fortune is, indeed, as the ancients 



ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD. 69 

painted her, very like a woman — not quite so un- 
reasonable and inconsistent, but nearly so — and 
the pursuit is much the same in one case as in 
the other. Ben Jonson's couplet — 

" Court a mistress, she denies you ; 
Let her alone, she will court you " — 

puts them both in a nutshell. A woman never 
thoroughly cares for her lover until he has ceased 
to care for her ; and it is not until you have 
snapped your fingers in Fortune's face, and 
turned on your heel, that she begins to smile 
upon you. 

But, by that time, you do not much care 
whether she smiles or frowns. Why could she 
not have smiled when her smiles would have 
filled you with ecstasy ? Everything comes too 
late in this world. 

Good people say that it is quite right and 
proper that it should be so, and that it proves 
ambition is wicked. 

Bosh ! Good people are altogether wrong. 
(They always are, in my opinion. We never 
agree on any single point.) What would the 
world do without ambitious people, I should like 
to know ? Why, it would be as flabby as a Nor- 



70 ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD, 

folk dumpling. Ambitious people are the leaven 
which raises it into wholesome bread. Without 
ambitious people, the world would never get up. 
They are busybodies who are about early in the 
morning, hammering, shouting, and rattling the 
fire-irons, and rendering it generally impossible 
for the rest of the house to remain in bed. 

Wrong to be ambitious, forsooth ! The men 
wrong, who, with bent back and sweating brow, cut 
the smooth road over which Humanity marches 
forward from generation to generation ! Men 
wrong, for using the talents that their Master has 
entrusted to them — for toiling while others play ! 

Of course, they are seeking their reward. 
Man is not given that god-like unselfishness 
that thinks only of others' good. But in work- 
ing for themselves they are working for us 
all. We are so bound together that no man can 
labor for himself alone. Each blow he strikes 
in his own behalf helps to mold the Universe. 
The stream, in struggling onward, turns the mill- 
wheel ; the coral insect, fashioning its tiny cell, 
joins continents to one another; and the ambiti- 
ous man, building a pedestal for himself, leaves a 
monument to posterity. Alexander and Caesar 



ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD. 71 

fought for their own ends, but, in doing so, they 
put a belt of civilization half round the earth. 
Stephenson, to win a fortune, invented the 
steam-engine ; and Shakespeare wrote his plays 
in order to keep a comfortable home for Mrs. 
Shakespeare and the little Shakespeares. 

Contented, unambitious people are all very 
well in their way. They form a neat, useful 
background for great portraits to be painted 
against ; and they make a respectable, if not par- 
ticularly intelligent, audience for the active spirits 
of the age to play before. I have not a word to 
say against contented people so long as they 
keep quiet. But do not, for goodness' sake, let 
them go strutting about, as they are so fond of 
doing, crying out that they are the true models 
for the whole species. Why, they are the dead- 
heads, the drones in the great hive, the street 
crowds that lounge about, gaping at those who 
are working. 

And let them not imagine either — as they are 
also fond of doing — that they are very wise and 
philosophical, and that it is a very artful thing to 
be contented. It may be true that *' a contented 
mind is happy anywhere," but so is a Jerusalem 



72 ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD. 

pony, and the consequence is that both are put 
anywhere and are treated anyhow. '' Oh, you 
need not bother about Jiim!' is what is said ; " he 
is very contented as he is, and it would be a pity 
to disturb him." And so your contented party 
is passed over, and the discontented man gets his 
place. 

If you are foolish enough to be contented, 
don't show it, but grumble with the rest ; and if 
you can do with a little, ask for a great deal. 
Because if you don't, you won't get any. In this 
world, it is necessary to adopt the principle pur- 
sued by the plaintiff in an action for damages, 
and to demand ten times more than you are 
ready to accept. If you can feel satisfied with a 
hundred, begin by insisting on a thousand ; if 
you start by suggesting a hundred, you will only 
get ten. 

It was by not following this simple plan that 
poor Jean Jacques Rousseau came to such grief. 
He fixed the summit of his earthly bliss at living 
in an orchard with an amiable woman and a cow, 
and he never attained even that. He did get as 
far as the orchard, but the woman was not ami- 
able, and she brought her mother with her, and 



ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD. 73 

there was no cow. Now, if he had made up his 
mind for a large country estate, a houseful of 
angels, and a cattle show, he might have lived to 
possess his kitchen garden and one head of live 
stock, and even possibly have come across that 
rara-avis — a really amiable woman. 

What a terribly dull affair, too, life must be 
for contented people ! How heavy the time 
must hang upon their hands, and what on earth 
do they occupy their thoughts with, supposing 
that they have any? Reading the paper and 
smoking seems to be the intellectual food of the 
majority of them, to which the more energetic 
add playing the flute and talking about the 
affairs of the next-door neighbor. 

They never knew the excitement of expecta- 
tion, nor the stern delight of accomplished 
effort, such as stir the pulse of the man who has 
objects, and hopes, and plans. To the ambitious 
man, life is a brilliant game — a game that calls 
forth all his tact and energy, and nerve — a game 
to 'be won, in the long run, by the quick eye and 
the steady hand, and yet having sufficient chance 
about its working out to give it all the glorious 
zest of uncertainty. He exults in it, as the 



74 ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD. 

strong swimmer in the heaving billows, as the 
athlete in the wrestle, the soldier in the battle. 

And if he be defeated, he wins the grim joy of 
fighting ; if he lose the race, he, at least, has had 
a run. Better to work and fail, than to sleep 
one's life away. 

So, walk up, walk up, walk up. Walk up, 

ladies and gentlemen! walk up, boys and girls! 

Show your skill and try your strength ; brave 

your luck, and prove your pluck. Walk up ! 

The show is never closed, and the game is 

always going. The only genuine sport in all the 

fair, gentlemen — highly respectable, and strictly 

moral — patronized by the nobility, clergy, and 

gentry. Established in the year one, gentlemen, 

and been flourishing ever since ! — walk up. 

Walk up, ladies and gentlemen, and take a hand. 

There are prizes for all, and all can play. There 

is gold for the man and fame for the boy ; rank 

for the maiden and pleasure for the fool. So 

walk up, ladies and gentlemen, walk up! — all 

prizes, and no blanks ; for some few win, and as 

to the rest, why — 

" The rapture of pursuing 

Is the prize the vanquished gain." 



ON THE WEATHER, 

'' I BRINGS do go so contrary like with me. I 
-■- wanted to hit upon an especially novel, out- 
of-the-way subject for one of these articles. " I 
will write one paper about something altogether 
new," I said to myself ; "something that nobody 
else has ever written or talked about before; 
and then I can have it all my own way." And I 
went about for days, trying to think of some- 
thing of this kind ; and I couldn't. And Mrs. 
Cutting, our charwoman, came yesterday — I 
don't mind mentioning her name, because I 
know she will not see this book. She would not 
look at such a frivolous publication. She never 
reads anything but the Bible and Lloyd's Weekly 
Nezus. All other literature she considers unnec- 
essary and sinful. 

She said : " Lor', sir, you do look worried." 
I said : " Mrs. Cutting, I am trying to think of 
a subject, the discussion of which will come upon 
the world in the nature of a startler — some sub- 

75 



7 6 ON- THE WEATHER. 

ject upon which no previous human being has 
ever said a word — some subject that will attract 
by its novelty, invigorate by its surprising fresh- 
ness." 

She laughed, and said I was a funny gentle- 
man. 

That's my luck again. When I make serious 
observations, people chuckle ; when I attempt a 
joke, nobody sees it. I had a beautiful one last 
week. I thought it so good, and I worked it up, 
and brought it in artfully at a dinner-party. I 
forget how exactly, but we had been talking 
about the attitude of Shakespeare toward the 
Reformation, and I said something, and immedi- 
ately added, "Ah, that reminds me; such a 
funny thing happened the other day in White- 
chapel." *' Oh," said they; ''what was that!" 
" Oh, 'twas awfully funny," I replied, beginning 
to giggle myself ; ''it will make you roar " ; and 
I told it them. 

There was dead silence when I finished — it 
was one of those long jokes, too — and then, at 
last, somebody said : " And that was the joke ? " 

I assure them that it was, and they were very 
polite, and took my word for it. All but one old 



ON THE WEATHER. 77 

gentleman, at the other end of the table, who 
wanted to know which was the joke — what he 
said to her, or what she said to him ; and we 
argued it out. 

Some people are too much the other way. I 
knew a fellow once, whose natural tendency to 
laugh at everything was so strong that, if you 
wanted to talk seriously to him, you had to 
explain beforehand that what you were going to 
say would not be amusing. Unless you got him 
to clearly understand this, he would go off into 
fits of merriment over every word you uttered. 
I have known him, on being asked the time, stop 
short in the middle of the road, slap his leg, and 
burst into a roar of laughter. One never dared 
say anything really funny to that man. A good 
joke would have killed him on the spot. 

In the present instance, I vehemently repu- 
diated the accusation of frivolity, and pressed 
Mrs. Cutting for practical ideas. She then 
became thoughtful and hazarded " samplers " ; 
saying that she never heard them spoken much 
of now, but that they used to be all the rage 
when she was a girl. 

I declined samplers, and begged her to think 



78 ON THE WEATHER. 

again. She pondered a long while, with a tea- 
tray in her hands, and at last suggested the 
weather, which she was sure had been most try- 
ing of late. 

And ever since that idiotic suggestion, I have 
been unable to get the weather out of my 
thoughts, or anything else in. 

It certainly is most WTetched weather. At 
all events, it is so, now, at the time I am writing, 
and, if it isn't particularly unpleasant when I 
come to be read, it soon will be. 

It always is wretched weather, according to 
us. The w^eather is like the Government, always 
in the wrong. In summer time w^e say it is 
stifling; in winter that it is killing; in spring 
and autumn we find fault with it for being 
neither one thing nor the other, and wish it 
would make up its mind. If it is fine, we say 
the country is being ruined for want of rain ; 
if it does rain, we pray for fine weather. If 
December passes without snow, we indignantly 
demand to know what has become of our good 
old-fashioned winters, and talk as if we had been 
cheated out of something we had bought and 
paid for ; and when it does snow, our language is 



ON THE WEATHER. 79 

a disgrace to a Christian nation. We shall 
never be content until each man makes his own 
weather and keeps it to himself. 

If that cannot be arranged, we would rather 
do without it altogether. 

Yet I think it is only to us in cities that all 
weather is so unwelcome. In her own home, 
the country, Nature is sweet in all her moods. 
What can be more beautiful than the snow, 
falling big with mystery in silent softness, deck- 
ing the fields and trees with white as if for a 
fairy wedding! And how delightful is a walk 
when the frozen ground rings beneath our 
swinging tread — when our blood tingles in the 
rare keen air, and the sheep dog's distant bark 
and children's laughter peals faintly clear like 
Alpine bells across the open hills ! And then 
skating ! scudding with wings of steel across the 
swaying ice waking whirring music as we fly. 
And oh, how dainty is spring — Nature at sweet 
eighteen ! When the little, hopeful leaves peep 
out so fresh and green, so pure and bright, like 
young lives pushing shyly out into the bustling 
world ; when the fruit-tree blossoms, pink and 
white, like village maidens in their Sunday 



So ON THE WEATHER. 

frocks, hide each white-washed cottage in a 
cloud of fragile splendor; and the cuckoo's note 
upon the breeze is wafted through the woods ! 
And summer, with its deep, dark green, and 
drowsy hum — when the rain drops whisper 
solemn secrets to the listening leaves, and the 
twilight lingers in the lanes ! And autumn ! ah, 
how sadly fair, with its golden glow, and the 
dying grandeur of its tinted woods — its blood- 
red sunsets, and its ghostly evening mists, with 
its busy murmur of reapers, and its laden 
orchards, and the calling of the gleaners, and 
the festivals of praise ! 

The very rain, and sleet, and hail seem only 
Nature's useful servants, when found doing their 
simple duties in the country ; and the East Wind 
himself is nothing worse than a boisterous friend, 
when we meet him between the hedgerows. 

But in the city, where the painted stucco blis- 
ters under the smoky sun, and the sooty rain 
brings slush and mud, and the snow lies piled in 
dirty heaps, and the chill blasts whistle down 
dingy streets, and shriek round flaring, gas-lit cor- 
ners, no face of Nature charms us. Weather in 
towns is like a skylark in a counting-house — out 



ON THE WEATHER. Si 

of place, and in the way. Towns ought to be 
covered in, warmed by hot-water pipes, and 
lighted by electricity. The weather is a country 
lass, and does not appear to advantage in town. 
We liked well enough to flirt with her in the hay- 
field, but she does not seem so fascinating when 
we meet her in Pall Mall. There is too much of 
her there. The frank, free laugh and hearty 
voice that sounded so pleasant in the dairy, jars 
against the artificiality of town-bred life, and her 
ways become exceedingly trying. 

Just lately she has been favoring us with almost 
incessant rain for about three weeks ; and I am a 
demd, damp, moist, unpleasant body, as Mr. 
Mantalini puts it. 

Our next-door neighbor comes out in the back 
garden every now and then, and says it's doing 
the country a world of good — not his coming out 
into the back garden, but the weather. He 
doesn't understand anything about it, but ever 
since he started a cucumber frame last summer, 
he has regarded himself in the light of an agricul- 
turist, and talks in this absurd way with the idea 
of impressing the rest of the terrace with the 
notion that he is a retired farmer. I can only 



82 ON THE WEATHER. 

hope that, for this once, he is correct, and that 
the weather really is doing good to something, 
because it is doing me a considerable amount of 
damage. It is spoiling both my clothes and my 
temper. The latter I can afford, as I have a 
good supply of it, but it wounds me to the quick 
to see my dear old hats and trousers sinking, pre- 
maturely worn and aged, beneath the cold world's 
blasts and snows. 

There is my new spring suit, too. A beautiful 
suit it was, and now it is hanging up so bespat- 
tered with mud, I can't bear to look at it. 

That was Jim's fault, that was. I should never 
have gone out in it that night, if it had not been 
for him. I was just trying it on when he came 
in. He threw up his arms with a wild yell, the 
moment he caught sight of it, and exclaimed that 
he had "got *em again !" 

I said: "Does it fit all right behind?" 

"Spififin, old man," he replied. And then he 
wanted to know if I was coming out. 

I said "no," at first, but he overruled me. He 
said that a man with a suit like that had no right 
to stop indoors. "Every citizen," said he, "owes 
a duty to the public. Each one should contrib- 



ON THE WEATHER. 83 

ute to the general happiness, as far as lies in his 
power. Come out, and give the girls a treat." 

Jim is slangy. I don't know where he picks it 
up. It certainly is not from me. 

I said: "Do you think it will really please 
'em? 

He said it would be like a day in the country 
to them. 

That decided me. It was a lovely evening, 
and I went. 

When I got home, I undressed and rubbed 
myself down with whisky, put my feet in hot 
water, and a mustard plaster on my chest, had a 
basin of gruel and a glass of hot brandy and 
water, tallowed my nose, and went to bed. 

These prompt and vigorous measures, aided by 
a naturally strong constitution, were the means of 
preserving my life ; but as for the suit ! Well, 
there, it isn't a suit ; its a splash board. 

And I did fancy that suit too. But that's just 
the way. I never do get particularly fond of 
anything in this world, but what something 
dreadful happens to it. I had a tame rat when I 
was a boy, and I loved that animal as only a boy 
would love an old water rat ; and, one day, it fell 



84 ON THE WEATHER. 

into a large dish of gooseberry-fool that was 
standing to cool in the kitchen, and nobody knew 
what had become of the poor creature, until the 
second helping. 

I do hate wet weather, in town. At least, it is 
not so much the wet, as the mud, that I object 
to. Somehow or other, I seem to possess an irre- 
sistible alluring power over mud. I have only to 
show myself in the street on a muddy day to be 
half smothered by it. It all comes of being so 
attractive, as the old lady said when she was 
struck by lightning. Other people can go out on 
dirty days, and walk about for hours without get- 
ting a speck upon themselves ; while, if I go 
across the road, I come back a perfect disgrace to 
be seen (as, in my boyish days, my poor dear 
mother used often to tell me). If there were 
only one dab of mud to be found in the whole of 
London, I am convinced I should carry it off 
from all competitors. 

I wish I could return the affection, but I fear 
I never shall be able to. I have a horror of 
what they call the " London particular." I feel 
miserable and muggy all through a dirty day, 
and it is quite a relief to pull one's clothes off 



ON THE WEATHER. 85 

and get into bed, out of the way of it all. 
Everything goes wrong in wet weather. I don't 
know how it is, but there always seem to me to 
be more people, and dogs, and perambulators, 
and cabs, and carts, about in wet weather, than 
at any other time, and they all get in your way 
more, and everybody is so disagreeable — except 
myself — and it does make me so wild. And 
then, too, somehow, I always find myself carry- 
ing more things in wet weather than in dry ; 
and, when you have a bag, and three parcels, 
and a newspaper ; and it suddenly comes on to 
rain, you can't open your umbrella. 

Which reminds me of another phase of the 
weather that I can't bear, and that is April 
weather (so-called, because it always comes in 
May). Poets think it very nice. As it does not 
know its own mind five minutes together, they 
liken it to a woman ; and it is supposed to be 
very charming on that account. I don't appre- 
ciate it, myself. Such lightning change business 
may be all very agreeable in a girl. It is no 
doubt highly delightful to have to do with a per- 
son who grins one moment about nothing at all, 
and snivels the next for precisely the same 



86 ON THE WEATHER. 

cause, and who then giggles, and then sulks, and 
who is rude, and affectionate, and bad-tempered, 
and jolly, and boisterous, and silent, and pas- 
sionate, and cold, and stand-offish, and flopping, 
all in one minute (mind / don't say this. It is 
those poets. And they are supposed to be con- 
noisseurs of this sort of thing); but in the 
weather, the disadvantages of the system are 
more apparent. A woman's tears do not make 
one wet, but the rain does ; and her coldness 
does not lay the foundations of asthma and 
rheumatism, as the east wind is apt to. I can 
prepare for, and put up with a regularly bad day, 
but these ha'porth-of-all-sorts kind of days do 
not suit me. It aggravates me to see a bright 
blue sky above me, when I am walking along 
wet through ; and there is something so exasper- 
ating about the way the sun comes out smiling 
after a drenching shower, and seems to say : 
"Lord, love you, you don't mean to say you're wet? 
Well, I am surprised. Why it was only my fun." 
They don't give you time to open or shut 
your umbrella in an English April, especially if 
it is an "automaton " one — the umbrella I mean, 
not the April. 



ON THE WEATHER. 87 

I bought an "automaton " once ia April, and 
I did have a time with it ! I wanted an um- 
brella, and I went into a shop in the Strand, and 
told them so, and they said — 

"Yes sir; what sort of an umbrella would you 
like?" 

I said I should like one that would keep the 
rain off, and that would not allow itself to be left 
behind in a railway carriage. 

"Try an 'automaton,' " said the shopman. 

"What's an 'automaton'?" said I. 

"Oh, it's a beautiful arrangement," replied the 
man, with a touch of enthusiasm. "It opens and 
shuts itself." 

I bought one, and found that he was quite cor- 
rect. It did open and shut itself. I had no con- 
trol over it whatever. When it began to rain, 
which it did, that season, every alternate five min- 
utes, I used to try and get the machine to open, 
but it would not budge; and then I used to stand 
and struggle with the wretched thing, and shake 
it, and swear at it, while the rain poured down in 
torrents. Then the moment the rain ceased, the 
absurd thing would go up suddenly with a jerk, 
and would not come down again ; and I had to 



88 ON THE WEATHER. 

walk about under a bright blue sky, with an 
umbrella over my head, wishing that it would 
come on to rain again, so that it might not seem 
that I was insane. 

When it did shut, it did so unexpectedly, and 
knocked one's hat off. 

I don't know why it should be so, but it is an 
undeniable fact that there is nothing makes a man 
look so supremely ridiculous as losing his hat. 
The feeling of helpless misery that shoots down 
one's back on suddenly becoming aware that one's 
head is bare is among the most bitter ills that 
flesh is heir to. And then there is the wild chase 
after it, accompanied by an excitable small dog, 
who thinks it is a game, and in the course of which 
you are certain to upset three or four innocent 
children — to say nothing of the irmothers — butt a 
fat old gentleman on to the top of a perambu- 
lator, and cannon off a ladies' seminary into the 
arms of a wet sweep. After this, the idiotic 
hilarity of the spectators, and the disreputable ap- 
pearance of the hat, when recovered, appear but 
of minor importance. 

Altogether, what between March winds, April 
showers, and the entire absence of May flowers, 



ON THE WEATHER. 89 

spring is not a success in cities. It is all very 
well in the country, as I have said, but in towns 
whose population is anything over ten thousand, 
it most certainly ought to be abolished. In the 
world's grim workshops, it is like the children — 
out of place. Neither show to advantage amidst 
the dust and din. It seems so sad to see the lit- 
tle dirt-grimed brats, trying to play in the noisy 
courts and muddy streets. Poor little uncared- 
for, unwanted human atoms, they are not chil- 
dren. Children are bright-eyed, chubby, and shy. 
These are dingy, screeching elves, their tiny faces 
seared and withered, their baby laughter cracked 
and hoarse. 

The spring of life, and the spring of the year, 
were alike meant to be cradled in the green lap of 
Nature. To us, in the town, spring brings but its 
cold winds and drizzling rains. We must seek it 
amongst the leafless woods, and the brambly 
lanes, on the heathy moors, and the great still 
hills, if we want to feel its joyous breath, and hear 
its silent voices. There is a glorious freshness in 
the spring there. The scurrying clouds, the open 
bleakness, the rushing wind, and the clear bright 
air, thrill one with vague energies and hopes. 



9© ON THE WEATHER. 

Life, like the landscape around us, seems bigger, 
and wijiler, and freer — a rainbow road, leading to 
unl^own ends. Through the silvery rents that 
1/ar the sky, we seem to catch a glimpse of the 
^eat hope and grandeur that lies around this 
rtltle throbbing world, and a breath of its scent 
is wafted us on the wings of the wild March 
wind. 

Strange thoughts we do not understand are stir- 
ring in our hearts. Voices are calling us to some 
great effort, to some mighty work. But we do 
not comprehend their meaning yet, and the hid- 
den echoes within us that would reply are strugg- 
ling, inarticulate, and dumb. 

We stretch our hands like children to the light, 
seeking to grasp we know not what. Our 
thoughts, like the boys' thoughts in the Danish 
song, are very long, long thoughts, and very 
vague ; we cannot see their end. 

It must be so. All thoughts that peer outside 
this narrow world cannot be else than dim and 
shapeless. The thoughts that we can clearly 
grasp are very little thoughts — that two and two 
make four — that when we are hungry it is pleas- 
ant to eat — that honesty is the best policy ; all 



ON THE WEATHER. 91 

greater thoughts are undefined and vast to our 
poor childish brains. We see but dimly through 
the mists that roll around our time-girt isle of 
life, and only hear the distant surging of the great 
sea beyond. 



ON CA TS AND DOGS, 

\ T THAT I've suffered from them this morn- 
^ ing no tongue can tell. It began with 
Gustavus Adolphus. Gustavus Adolphus (they 
call him '' Gusty*" downstairs for short) is a very 
good sort of dog, when he is in the middle of a 
large field, or on a fairly extensive common, but 
I won't have him in-doors. He means well, but 
this house is not his size. He stretches himself, 
and over go two chairs and a what-not. He 
wags his tail, and the room looks as if a devas- 
tating army had marched through it. He 
breathes and it puts the fire out. 

At dinner-time, he creeps in under the table, 
lies there for a while, and then gets up suddenly; 
the first intimation we have of his movements 
being given by the table, which appears animated 
by a desire to turn somersaults. We all clutch 
at it frantically, and endeavor to maintain it in a 
horizontal position ; whereupon his struggles, he 
being under the impression that some wicked 

92 



ON CATS AND DOGS. 93 

conspiracy is being hatched against him, become 
fearful, and the final picture presented is gener- 
ally that of an over-turned table and a smashed- 
up dinner, sandwiched between two sprawling 
layers of infuriated men and women. 

He came in this morning in his usual style, 
which he appears to have founded on that of an 
American cyclone, and the first thing he did was 
to sweep my coffee cup off the table with his tail, 
sending the contents full into the middle of my 
waistcoat. 

I rose from my chair, hurriedly, and remark- 

i^igj " /' approached him at a rapid rate. 

He preceded me in the direction of the door. 
At the door, he met Eliza, coming in with eggs. 
Eliza observed, '* Ugh ! " and sat down on the 
floor, the eggs took up different positions about 
the carpet, where they spread themselves out, 
and Gustavus Adolphus left the room. I called 
after him, strongly advising him to go straight 
downstairs, and not let me see him again for the 
next hour or so ; and he, seeming to agree with 
me, dodged the coal-scoop, and went ; while I re- 
turned, dried myself, and finished breakfast. I 
made sure that he had gone into the yard, but 



94 ON CATS AND DOGS. 

when I looked into the passage ten minutes 
later, he was sitting at the top of the stairs. I 
ordered him down at once, but he only barked 
and jumped about, so I went to see what was the 
matter. 

It was Tittums. She was sitting on the top 
stair but one, and wouldn't let him pass. 

Tittums is our kitten. She is about the size of 
a penny roll. Her back was up, and she was 
swearing like a medical student. 

She does swear fearfully. I do a little that 
way myself sometimes, but I am a mere amateur 
compared with her. To tell you the truth — 
mind, this is strictly between ourselves, please; 
I shouldn't like your wife to know I said it, the 
women folk don't understand these things; but 
between you and me, you know, I think it does a 
man good to swear. Swearing is the safety-valve 
through which the bad temper, that might other- 
wise do serious internal injury to his mental 
mechanism, escapes in harmless vaporing. When 
a man has said : "Bless you, my dear, sweet sir. 
What the sun, moon, and stars made you so care- 
less (if I may be permitted the expression) as to 
allow your light and delicate foot to descend 



OJV CATS AND DOGS. 95 

upon my corn with so much force? Is it that 
you are physically incapable of comprehending 
the direction in which you are proceeding? you 
nice, clever young man — you !" or words to that 
effect, he feels better. Swearing has the same 
soothing effect upon our angry passions that 
smashing the furniture or slamming the doors is 
so well known to exercise ; added to which it is 
much cheaper. Swearing clears a man out like a 
pen'orth of gunpowder does the wash-house chim- 
ney. An occasional explosion is good for both. 
I rather distrust a man who never swears, or sav- 
agely kicks the footstool, or pokes the fire with 
unnecessary violence. Without some outlet, the 
anger caused by the ever-occurring troubles of life 
is apt to rankle and fester within. The petty 
annoyance, instead of being thrown from us, sits 
down beside us, and becomes a sorrow, and the 
little offence is brooded over till, in the hot-bed 
of rumination, it grows into a great injury, under 
whose poisonous shadow springs up hatred and 
revenge. 

Swearing relieves the feelings, that is what 
swearing does. I explained this to my aunt 
on one occasion, but it didn't answer with her. 



96 ON CATS AND DOGS. 

She said I had no business to have such 
feelings. 

That is what I told Tittums. I told her she 
ought to be ashamed of herself, brought up in a 
Christian family as she was, too. I don't so 
much mind hearing an old cat swear, but I can't 
bear to see a mere kitten give way to it. It 
seems sad in one so young. 

I put Tittums in my pocket, and returned to 
my desk. I forgot her for the moment, and 
when I looked I found that she had squirmed out 
of my pocket on to the table, and was trying to 
swallow the pen ; then she put her leg into the ink- 
pot and upset it; then she licked her leg; then 
she swore again — at me this time. 

I put her down on the floor, and there Tim 
began rowing with her. I do wish Tim would 
mind his own business. It was no concern of his 
what she had been doing. Besides, he is not a 
saint himself. He is only a two-year-old fox ter- 
rier, and he interferes with everything, and gives 
himself the airs of a gray-headed Scotch collie. 

Tittums' mother has come in, and Tim has got 
his nose scratched, for which I am remarkably 
glad. I have put them all three out in the pas- 



ON CATS AND DOGS. 97 

sage, where they are fighting at the present mo- 
ment. I'm in a mess with the ink, and in a thun- 
dering bad temper; and if anything more in the 
cat or dog Hne comes fooHng about me this morn- 
ing, it had better bring its own funeral contractor 
with it. 

Yet, in general, I like cats and dogs very much 
indeed. What jolly chaps they are ! They are 
much superior to human beings as companions. 
They do not quarrel or argue with you. They 
never talk about themselves, but listen to you 
while you talk about yourself, and keep up an 
appearance of being interested in the conversa- 
tion. They never make stupid remarks. They 
never observe to Miss Brown across a dinner- 
table, that they always understood she was very 
sweet on Mr. Jones (who has just married Miss 
Robinson). They never mistake your wife's 
cousin for her husband, and fancy that you are 
the father-in-law. And they never ask a young 
author with fourteen tragedies, sixteen comedies, 
seven firces, and a couple of burlesques in his 
desk, why he doesn't write a play. 

They never say unkind things. They never 
tell us of our faults, "merely for our own good." 



98 ON CA TS AND DOGS. 

They do not, at inconvenient moments, mildly 
remind us of our past follies and mistakes. They 
do not say, "Oh yes, a lot of use you are, if you 
are ever really wanted" — sarcastic like. They 
never inform us, like our inamoratas sometimes 
do, that we are not nearly so nice as we used to 
be. We are always the same to them. 

They are always glad to see us. They are 
with us in all our humors. They are merry when 
we are glad, sober when we feel solemn, and sad 
when we are sorrowful. 

"Hulloa! happy, and want a lark! Right you 
are; I'm your man. Here I am, frisking round 
you, leaping, barking, pirouetting, ready for any 
amount of fun and mischief. Look at my eyes, 
if you doubt me. What shall it be? A romp in 
the drawing-room, and never mind the furniture, 
or a scamper in the fresh, cool air, a scud across 
the fields, and down the hill, and wont we let old 
Gaffer Goggles*s geese know what time o' day it 
is, neither. Whoop! come along." 

Or you'd like to be quiet and think. Very 
well. Pussy can sit on the arm of the chair, and 
purr, and Montmorency will curl himself up on 
the rug, and blink at the fire, yet keeping one eye 



ON CATS AND DOGS. 99 

on you the while, in case you are seized with any 
sudden desire in the direction of rats. 

And when we bury our face in our hands and 
wish we had never been born, they don*t sit up 
very straight, and observe that we have brought 
it all upon ourselves. They don't even hope it 
will be a warning to us. But they come up 
softly; and shove their heads against us. If it is 
a cat, she stands on your shoulder, rumples your 
hair, and says, "Lor', I am sorry for you old 
man," as plain as words can speak; and if it is a 
dog, he looks up at you with his big, true eyes, 
and says with them, "Well, you've always got 
me, you know. We'll go through the world 
together, and always stand by each other, wont 
we? 

He is very imprudent, a dog is. He never 
makes it his business to inquire whether you are 
in the right or in the wrong, never bothers as to 
whether you are going up or down upon life's 
ladder, never asks whether you are rich or poor, 
silly or wise, sinner or saint. You are his pal. 
That is enough for him, and, come luck or mis- 
fortune, good repute or bad, honor or shame, he is 
going to stick to you, to comfort you, guard you, 



lOO ON CATS AND DOGS. 

and give his life for you, if need be — foolish, 
brainless, soulless dog! 

Ah ! old staunch friend, with your deep, clear 
eyes, and bright, quick glances, that take in all 
one has to say before one has time to speak it, 
do you know you are only an animal, and have 
no mind? Do you know that that dull-eyed, 
gin-sodden lout, leaning against the post out 
there, is immeasurably your intellectual supe- 
rior? Do you know that every little-minded, 
selfish scoundrel, who lives by cheating and 
tricking, who never did a gentle deed, or said a 
kind word, who never had a thought that was 
not mean and low, or a desire that was not base, 
whose every action is a fraud, whose every utter- 
ance is a lie ; do you know that these crawling 
skulks (and there are millions of them in the 
world), do you know they are all as much 
superior to you as the sun is superior to rush- 
light, you honorable, brave-hearted, unselfish 
brute ? They are MEN, you know, and MEN are 
the greatest, and noblest, and wisest, and best 
Beings in the whole vast eternal Universe. Any 
man will tell you that. 

Yes, poor doggie, }'Ou are very stupid, very 



ON CATS AND DOGS. lOI 

stupid indeed, compared with us clever men, who 
understand all about politics and philosophy, 
and who know everything in short, except what 
we are, and where we came from, and whither we 
are going, and what everything outside this tiny 
world and most things in it are. 

Never mind, though, pussy and doggie, we 
like you both all the better for your being 
stupid. We all like stupid things. Men can't 
bear clever women, and a woman's ideal man is 
some one she can call a "dear old stupid." It 
is so pleasant to come across people more stupid 
than ourselves. We love them at once for being 
so. The world must be rather a rough place for 
clever people. Ordinary folk dislike them, and 
as for themselves they hate each other most 
cordially. 

But there, the clever people are such a very 
insignificant minority that it really doesn't much 
matter if they are unhappy. So long as the fool- 
ish people can be made comfortable, the world, 
as a whole, will get on tolerably well. 

Cats have the credit of being more worldly 
wise than dogs — of looking more after their own 
interests, and being less blindly devoted to those 



102 ON CATS AND DOGS. 

of their friends. And we men and women are 
naturally shocked at such selfishness. Cats cer- 
tainly do love a family that has a carpet in the 
kitchen more than a family that has not ; and if 
there are many children about, they prefer to 
spend their leisure time next door. But, taken 
altogether, cats are libelled. Make a friend of 
one, and she will stick to you through thick and 
thin. All the cats that I have had have been 
most firm comrades. I had a cat once that used 
to follow me about everywhere, until it even got 
quite embarrassing, and I had to beg her, as a 
personal favor, not to accompany me any further 
down the High Street. She used to sit up for 
me when I was late home, and meet me in the 
passage. It made me feel quite like a married 
man, except that she never asked where I had 
been, and then didn't believe me when I told her. 
Another cat I had used to get drunk regularly 
every day. She would hang about for hours 
outside the cellar door for the purpose of sneak- 
ing in on the first opportunity, and lapping up 
the drippings from the beer cask. I do not men- 
tion this habit of hers in praise of the species, 
but merely to show how almost human some of 



ON CATS AND DOGS. 103 

them are. If the transmigration of souls is a fact, 
this animal was certainly qualifying most rapidly 
for a Christian, for her vanity was only second to 
her love of drink. Whenever she caught a par- 
ticularly big rat, she would bring it up into the 
room where we were all sitting, lay the corpse 
down in the midst of us, and wait to be praised. 
Lord ! how the girls used to scream. 

Poor rats ! They seem only to exist so that 
cats and dogs may gain credit for killing them, 
and chemists make a fortune by inventing speci- 
alities in poison for their destruction. And yet 
there is something fascinating about them. 
There is a weirdness and uncanniness attaching 
to them. They are so cunning and strong, so 
terrible in their numbers, so cruel, so secret. 
They swarm in deserted houses, where the broken 
casements hang rotting to the crumbling walls, 
and the doors swing creaking on their rusty 
hinges. They know the sinking ship, and leave 
her, no one knows how or whither. They whis- 
per to each other in their hiding-places, how a 
doom will fall upon the hall, and the great name 
die forgotten. They do fearful deeds in ghastly 
charnel-houses. 



I04 ON CATS AND DOGS. 

No tale of horror is complete without the rats. 
In stories of ghosts and murderers, they scamper 
through the echoing rooms, and the gnawing of 
their teeth is heard behind the wainscot, and their 
gleaming eyes peer through the holes in the 
worm-eaten tapestry, and they scream in shrill, 
unearthly notes in the dead of night, while the 
moaning wind sweeps, sobbing, round the ruined 
turret towers, and passes wailing like a woman 
through the chambers bare and tenantless. 

And dying prisoners, in their loathsome dun- 
geons, see, through the horrid gloom, their small 
red eyes, like glittering coals, hear, in the death- 
like silence, the rush of their claw-like feet, and 
start up shrieking in the darkness, and watch 
through the awful night. 

I love to read tales about rats. They make 
my flesh creep so. I like that tale of Bishop 
Hatto and the rats. The wicked Bishop, you 
know, had ever so much corn, stored in his gran- 
aries, and would not let the starving people touch 
it, but, when they prayed to him for food, gath- 
ered them together in his barn, and then shutting 
the doors on them, set fire to the place and 
burned them all to death. But next day there 



ON CATS AND DOGS. 10$ 

came thousands upon thousands of rats, sent to 
do judgment on him. Then Bishop Hatto fled 
to his strong tower that stood in the middle of 
the Rhine, and barred himself in, and fancied he 
was safe. Bnt the rats ! they swam the river, 
they gnawed their way through the thick stone 
walls, and ate him alive where he sat. 

** They have whetted their teeth against the stones, 
And now they pick the Bishop's bones ; 
They gnawed the flesh from every limb, 
For they were sent to do judgment on him." 

Oh, it's a lovely tale. 

Then there is the story of the Pied Piper of 
Hamelin, how first he piped the rats away, and 
afterward, when the Mayor broke faith with him, 
drew all the children along with him, and went 
into the mountain. What a curious old legend 
that is ! I wonder what it means, or has it any 
meaning at all ? There seems something strange 
and deep lying hid beneath the rippling rhyme. 
It haunts me, that picture of the quaint, mysteri- 
ous old piper, piping through Hamelin's narrow 
streets, and the children following with dancing 
feet and thoughtful, eager faces. The old folks 
try to stay them, but the children pay no heed. 



lo6 ON CATS AND DOGS. 

They hear the weird, witched music, and must 
follow. The games are left unfinished, and the 
playthings drop from their careless hands. They 
know not whither they are hastening. The 
mystic music calls to them, and they follow, 
heedless and unasking where. It stirs and vi- 
brates in their hearts, and other sounds grow 
faint. So they wander through Pied Piper street 
away from Hamelin town. 

I get thinking sometimes if the Pied Piper is 
really dead, or if he may not still be roaming up 
and down our streets and lanes, but playing now 
so softly that only the children hear him. Why 
do the little faces look so grave and solemn when 
they pause awhile from romping, and stand, deep 
wrapt, with straining eyes ? They only shake 
their curly heads, and dart back laughing to their 
playmates when we question them. But I fancy 
myself they have been listening to the magic 
music of the old Pied Piper, and, perhaps, with 
those bright eyes of theirs, have even seen his 
odd, fantastic figure, gliding unnoticed, through 
the whirl and throng. 

Even we grown-up children hear his piping now 
and then. But the yearning notes are very far 



OiV CATS AND DOGS. 107 

away, and the noisy, blustering world is always 
bellowing so loud, it drowns the dream-like 
melody. One day the sweet sad strains will 
sound out full and clear, and then we too shall, 
like the little children, throw our playthings all 
aside, and follow. The loving hands will be 
stretched out to stay us, and the voices we have 
learnt to listen for will cry to us to stop. But we 
shall push the fond arms gently back, and pass 
out through the sorrowing house and through the 
open door. For the wild strange music will be 
ringing in our hearts, and we shall know the mean- 
ing of its song by then. 

I wish people could love animals without get- 
ting maudlin over them, as so many do. 
Women are the most hardened offenders in such 
respects, but even our intellectual sex often de- 
grade pets into nuisances by absurd idolatry. 
There are the gushing young ladies who, having 
read David Copperfield, have thereupon sought 
out a small, long haired dog of nondescript breed, 
possessed of an irritating habit of criticising a 
man's trousers, and of finally commenting upon 
the same by a sniff, indicative of contempt and 
disgust. They talk sweet girlish prattle to this 



lo8 ON CATS AND DOGS. 

animal (when there is any one near enough to 
overhear them), and they kiss its nose, and put its 
unwashed head up against their cheek in a most 
touching manner; though I have noticed that 
these caresses are principally performed when 
there are young men hanging about. 

Then there are the old ladies who worship a fat 
poodle, scant of breath and full of fleas. I knew a 
couple of elderly spinsters once who had a sort of 
German sausage on legs which they called a dog 
between them. They used to wash its face with 
warm water every morning. It had a mutton cut- 
let regularly for breakfast ; and on Sundays, when 
one of the ladies went to church, the other always 
stopped at home to keep the dog company. 

There are many families where the whole inter- 
est of life is centered upon the dog. Cats, by the 
way, rarely suffer from excess of adulation. A 
cat possesses a very fair sense of the ridiculous, 
and will put her paw down kindly but firmly upon 
any nonsense of this kind. Dogs, however, seem 
to like it. They encourage their owners in the 
tomfoolery, and the consequence is, that in the 
circles I am speaking of, what "dear Fido" has 
done, does do, will do, won't do, can do, can't do, 



ON CATS AND DOGS. 109 

was doing, is doing, is going to do, shall do, shant 
do, and is about to be going to have done is the 
continual theme of discussion from morning till 
night. 

All the conversation, consisting, as it does, of 
the very dregs of imbecility, is addressed to this 
confounded animal. The family sit in a row all 
day long, watching him, commenting upon his 
actions, telling each other anecdotes about him, 
recalling his virtues, and remembering with tears 
how one day they lost him for two whole hours, 
on which occasion he was brought home in a most 
brutal manner by the butcher boy, who had been 
met carrying him by the scruff of his neck with one 
hand, while soundly cuffing his head with the other. 

After recovering from these bitter recollections, 
they vie with each other in bursts of admiration 
for the brute, until some more than usually en- 
thusiastic member, unable any longer to control 
his feelings, swoops down upon the unhappy 
quadruped, in a frenzy of affection, clutches it to 
his heart, and slobbers over it. Whereupon, the 
others, mad with envy, rise up, and, seizing as 
much of the dog as the greed of the first one has 
left to them, murmur praise and devotion. 



no ON CATS AND DOGS. 

Among these people, everything is done through 
the dog. If you want to make love to the eldest 
daughter, or get the old man to lend you the gar- 
den roller, or the mother to subscribe to the So- 
ciety for the Suppression of Solo-coronet Players 
in Theatrical Orchestras (its' a pity there isn't one, 
anyhow), you have to begin with the dog. You 
must gain its approbation before they will even 
listen to you, and if, as is highly probable, the 
animal, whose frank, doggy nature has been 
warped by the unnatural treatment he has re- 
ceived, responds to your overtures of friendship 
by viciously snapping at you, your cause is lost 
for ever. 

"If Fido won't take to any one," the father has 
thoughtfully remarked beforehand, "I say that 
man is not to be trused. You know, Maria, how 
often I have said that. Ah ! he knows, bless 
him." 

Drat him ! 

And to think that the surly brute was once an 
innocent puppy, all legs and head, full of fun and 
play, and burning with ambition to become a big, 
good dog, and bark like mother. 

Ah me! life sadly changes us all. The world 



ON CATS AND DOGS. Ill 

seems a vast horrible grinding machine, into which 
what is fresh and bright and pure is pushed at 
one end, to come out old and crabbed and 
wrinkled at the other. 

Look even at Pussy Sobersides, with her dull, 
sleepy glance, her grave slow walk, and dignified, 
prudish airs ; who could ever think that once she 
was the blue-eyed, whirling, scampering, head- 
over-heels, mad little firework that we call a 
kitten. 

What marvelous vitality a kitten has. It is 
really something very beautiful the way life bub- 
bles over in the little creatures. They rush 
about, and mew, and spring ; dance on their hind 
legs, embrace everything with their front ones, 
roll over and over and over, lie on their backs 
and kick. They don't know what to do with 
themselves, they are so full of life. 

Can you remember, reader, when you and I felt 
something of the same sort of thing? Can you 
remember those glorious days of fresh young 
manhood ; how, when coming home along the 
moonlit road, tve felt too full of life for sober 
walking, and had to spring and skip, and wave 
our arms, and shout, till belated farmers' wives 



112 oy CATS AND DOGS. 

thought — and with good reason, too — that we 
were mad, and kept close to the hedge, while we 
stood and laughed aloud to see them scuttle off 
so fast, and made their blood run cold with a 
wild parting whoop ; and the tears came, we 
knew not why. Oh, that magnificent young 
Life ! that crowned us kings of the earth ; that 
rushed through every tingling vein, till we 
seemed to walk on air; that thrilled through our 
throbbing brains, and told us to go forth and 
conquer the whole world ; that welled up in our 
young hearts, till we longed to stretch out our 
arms and gather all the toiling men and women 
and the little children to our breast, and love 
them all — all. Ah ! they were grand days, those 
deep, full days, when our coming life, like an un- 
seen organ, pealed strange, yearnful music in our 
ears, and our young blood cried out like a war- 
horse for the battle. Ah, our pulse beats slow 
and steady now, and our old joints are rheu- 
matic, and we love our easy chair and pipe, and 
sneer at boys' enthusiasm. But, oh ! for one 
brief moment of that god-like life again. 



ON BEING SHY. 

A LL great literary men are shy. I am myself, 
"^ -^ though I am told it is hardly noticeable. 

I am glad it is not. It used to be extremely 
prominent at one time, and was the cause of 
much misery to myself, and discomfort to every 
one about me — my lady friends, especially, com- 
plained most bitterly about it. 

A shy man's lot is not a happy one. The men 
dislike him, the women despise him, and he dis- 
likes and despises himself. Use brings him no 
relief, and there is no cure for him except time ; 
though I once came across a delicious receipt for 
overcoming the misfortune. It appeared among 
the *' answers to correspondents " in a small, 
weekly journal, and ran as follows — I have never 
forgotten it : — '' Adopt an easy and pleasing 
manner, especially toward ladies." 

Poor wretch ! I can imagine the grin with 
which he must have read that advice. ** Adopt 
an easy and pleasing manner, especially toward 

^t3 



It4 ON BEING SHY. 

ladies," forsooth! Don't you adopt anything 
of the kind, my dear young shy friend. Your at- 
tempt to put on any other disposition than your 
own will infallibly result in your becoming ridic- 
ulously gushing and offensively familiar. Be 
your own natural self, and then you will only be 
thought to be surly and stupid. 

The shy man does have some slight revenge 
upon society for the torture it inflicts upon him. 
He is able, to a certain extent, to communicate 
his misery. He frightens other people as much 
as they frighten him. He acts like a damper 
upon the whole room, and the most jovial spirits 
become, in his presence, depressed and nervous. 

This is a good deal brought about by misun- 
derstanding. Many people mistake the shy man's 
timidity for overbearing arrogance, and are awed 
and insulted by it. His awkwardness is resented 
as insolent carelessness, and when, terror-stricken 
at the first word addressed to him, the blood 
rushes to his head, and the power of speech com- 
pletely fails him, he is regarded as an awful exr 
ample of the evil effects of giving way to pas- 
sion". 

But, indeed, to be misunderstood is the shy 



ON BEING SHY. 115 

man's fate on every occasion ; and, whatever im- 
pression he endeavors to create, he is sure to 
convey its opposite. When he makes a joke, it 
is looked upon as a pretended relation of fact, 
and his want of veracity much condemned. His 
sarcasm is accepted as his literal opinion, and 
gains for him the reputation of being an ass; 
while if, on the other hand, wishing to ingratiate 
himself, he ventures upon a little bit of flattery, 
it is taken for satire, and he is hated ever after- 
wards. 

These, and the rest of a shy man's troubles, are 
always very amusing, to other people ; and have 
afforded material for comic writing from time 
immemorial. But if we look a little deeper, we 
shall find there is a pathetic, one might almost 
say a tragic, side to the picture. A shy man 
means a lonely man — a man cut off from all com- 
panionship, all sociability. He moves about the 
world, but does not mix with it. Between him 
and his fellow-men there runs ever an impass- 
able barrier — a strong, invisible wall, that trying 
in vain to scale, he but bruises himself against. 
He sees the pleasant faces and hears the pleasant 
voices on the other side, but he cannot stretch his 



Ii6 ON BEING SHY. 

hand across to grasp another hand. He stands 
watching the merry groups, and he longs to speak, 
and to claim kindred with them. But they pass 
him by, chatting gaily to one another, and he can- 
not stay them. He tries to reach them, but his 
prison walls move with him, and hem him in on 
every side. In the busy street, in the crowded 
room, in the grind of work, in the whirl of pleas- 
ure, amidst the many or amidst the few ; where- 
ever men congregate together, wherever the 
music of human speech is heard, and human 
thought is flashed from human eyes, there, 
shunned and solitary, the shy man, like a leper, 
stands apart. His soul is full of love and long- 
ing, but the world knows it not. The iron mask 
of shyness is riveted before his face, and the man 
beneath is never seen. Genial words and hearty 
greetings are ever rising to his lips, but they die 
away in unheard whispers behind the steel 
clamps. His heart aches for the weary brother, 
but his sympathy is dumb. Contempt and indig- 
nation against wrong choke up his throat, and, 
finding no safety valve, when in passionate utter- 
ance they may burst forth, they only turn in 
again and harm him. All the hate, and scorn. 



ON BEING SHY. 117 

and love of a deep nature, such as the shy man is 
ever cursed by, fester and corrupt within, instead 
of spending themselves abroad, and sour him into 
a misanthrope and cynic. 

Yes, shy men, like ugly women, have a bad 
time of it in this world, to go through which with 
any comfort needs the hide of a rhinoceros. 
Thick skin is, indeed, our moral clothes, and with- 
out it, we are not fit to be seen about in civilized 
society. A poor gasping, blushing creature, with 
trembling knees and twitching hands, is a painful 
sight to every one, and if it cannot cure itself, the 
sooner it goes and hangs itself the better. 

The disease can be cured. For the comfort of 
the shy, I can assure them of that from personal 
experience. I do not like speaking about myself, 
as may have been noticed, but in the cause of 
humanity I, on this occasion, will do so, and will 
confess that at one time I was, as the young man 
in the Bab Ballad says, "the shyest of the shy," 
and "whenever I was introduced to any pretty 
maid, my knees they knocked together just as if 
I was afraid." Now, I would — nay, have — on this 
very day before yesterday I did the deed. Alone 
and entirely by myself (as the schoolboy said in 



|i8 ON BEING SHY. 

translating the Belluin Gallicum) did I beard a 
railway refreshment-room young lady in her own 
lair. I rebuked her in terms of mingled bitter- 
ness and sorrow for her callousness and want 
of condescension. I insisted, courteously but 
firmly, on being accorded that deference and 
attention that was the right of the traveling 
Briton ; and, at the end, / looked her full in the 
face. Need I say more? 

True, that immediately after doing so, I left 
the room with what may possibly have appeared 
to be precipitation, and without waiting for any 
refreshment. But that was because I had 
changed my mind, not because I was frightened, 
you understand. 

One consolation that shy folk can take unto 
themselves is that shyness is certainly no sign of 
stupidity. It is easy enough for bull-headed 
clowns to sneer at nerves, but the highest natures 
are not necessarily those containing the greatest 
amount of moral brass. The horse is not an infe- 
rior animal to the cock-sparrow, nor the deer of 
the forest to the pig. Shyness simply means 
extreme sensibility, and has nothing whatever to 
do with self-consciousness or with conceit, though 



ON BEING SHY. 119 

its relationship to both is continually insisted 
upon by the poll-parrot school of philosophy. 

Conceit, indeed, is the quickest cure for it. 
When it once begins to dawn upon you that you 
are a good deal cleverer than any one else in this 
world, bashfulness becomes shocked, and leaves 
you. When you can look round a roomful of 
people, and think that each one is a mere child in 
intellect compared with yourself, you feel no 
more shy of them than you would of a select 
company of mapgies or orang-outangs. 

Conceit is the finest armor that a man can 
wear. Upon its smooth, impenetrable surface 
the puny dagger-thrusts of spite and envy glance 
harmlessly aside. Without that breast-plate, the 
sword of talent cannot force its way through the 
battle of life, for blows have to be borne as well 
as dealt. I do not, of course, speak of the con- 
ceit that displays itself in an elevated nose and a 
falsetto voice. That is not real conceit, that is 
only playing at being conceited ; like children 
play at being kings and queens, and go strutting 
about with feathers and long trains. Genuine 
conceit does not make a man objectionable. On 
the contrary, it tends to make him genial, kind- 



I20 ON BEING SHY. 

hearted, and simple. He has no need of affecta- 
tion, he is far too well satisfied with his own char- 
acter; and his pride is too deep-seated to appear 
at all on the outside. Careless alike of praise or 
blame, he can afford to be truthful. Too far, in 
fancy, above the rest of mankind to trouble about 
their petty distinctions, he is equally at home 
with duke or costermonger. And, valuing no 
one's standard but his own, he is never tempted 
to practise that miserable pretence that less self- 
reliant people offer up as an hourly sacrifice to 
the god of their neighbor's opinion. 

The shy man, on the other hand, is humble — 
modest of his own judgment, and over-anxious 
concerning that of others. But this, in the case 
of a young man, is surely right enough. His 
character is unformed. It is slowly evolving 
itself out of a chaos of doubt and disbelief. 
Before the growing insight and experience, the 
diffidence recedes. A man rarely carries his 
shyness past the hobbledehoy period. Even if 
his own inward strength does not throw it off, the 
rubbings of the world generally smooth it down. 
You scarcely ever meet a really shy man — 
except in novels or on the stage, where, by- 



ON BEING SHY. 121 

the-bye, he is much admired, especially by the 
women. 

There, in that supernatural land, he appears as 
a fair-haired and saint-like young man — fair hair 
and goodness always go together on the stage. 
No respectable audience would believe in one 
without the other. I knew an actor who mislaid 
his wig once, and had to rush on to play the hero 
in his own hair, which was jet black, and the 
gallery howled at all his noble sentiments under 
the impression that he was the villain. He — the 
shy young man — loves the heroine, oh so 
devotedly (but only in asides, for he dare not tell 
her of it), and he is so noble and unselfish, and 
speaks in such a low voice, and is so good to his 
mother; and the bad people in the play, they 
laugh at him, and jeer at him, but he takes it all 
so gently, and, in the end, it transpires that he is 
such a clever man, though nobody knew it, and 
then the heroine tells him she loves him, and he 
is so surprised, and oh, so happy ! and everybody 
loves him, and asks him to forgive them, which 
he does in a few well-chosen and sarcastic words, 
and blesses them ; and he seems to have gener- 
ally such a good time of it that all the young 



122 ON BEING SHY. 

fellows who are not shy long to be shy. But the 
really shy man knows better. He knows that it 
is not quite so pleasant in reality. He is not 
quite so interesting there as in the fiction. He is 
a little more clumsy and stupid, and a little less 
devoted and gentle, and his hair is much darker, 
which, taken altogether, considerably alters the 
aspect of the case. 

The point where he does resemble his ideal is 
in his faithfulness. I am fully prepared to allow 
the shy young man that virtue : he is constant in 
his love. But the reason is not far to seek. The 
fact is it exhausts all his stock of courage to look 
one woman in the face, and it would be simply 
impossible for him to go through the ordeal with 
a second. He stands in far too much dread of 
the whole female sex to want to go gadding 
about with many of them. One is quite enough 
for him. 

Now, it is different with the young man who is 
not shy. He has temptations which his bashful 
brother never encounters. He looks around, and 
everywhere sees roguish eyes and laughing lips. 
What more natural than that amidst so many 
roguish eyes and laughing lips he should become 



ON BEING SHY. J 23 

confused, and, forgetting for the moment which 
particular pair of roguish eyes and laughing lips 
it is that he belongs to, go off making love to 
the wrong set. The shy man, who never looks 
at anything but his own boots, sees not, and is 
not tempted. Happy shy man ! 

Not but what the shy man himself would 
much rather not be happy in that way. He 
longs to "" go it " with the others, and curses 
himself every day for not being able to. He 
will, now and again, screwing up his courage by 
a tremendous effort, plunge into roguishness. 
But it is always a terrible fiasco, and after one or 
two feeble flounders, he crawls out again, limp 
and pitiable. 

I say " pitiable," though I am afraid he never 
is pitied. There are certain misfortunes which, 
while inflicting a vast amount of suffering upon 
their victims, gain for them no sympathy. 
Losing an umbrella, falling in love, toothache, 
black eyes, and having your hat sat upon, may 
be mentioned as a few examples, but the chief of 
them all is shyness. The shy man is regarded as 
an animate joke. His tortures are the sport of 



124 ON BEING SHY. 

the drawing-room arena, and are pointed out and 
discussed with much gusto. 

"■ Look," cry his tittering audience to each 
other, '* he's blushing ! " 

''Just watch his legs," says one. 

*' Do you notice how he is sitting?" adds 
another: " right on the edge of the chair." 

"Seems to have plenty of color," sneers a 
military-looking gentleman. 

** Pity he's got so many hands," murmurs an 
elderly lady, with her own calmly folded on her 
lap. ''They quite confuse him." 

*' A yard or two off his feet wouldn't be a dis- 
advantage," chimes in the comic man, " especi- 
ally as he seems so anxious to hide them." 

And then another suggests that with such a 
voice he ought to have been a sea captain. 
Some draw attention to the desperate way in 
which he is grasping his hat. Some comment 
upon his limited powers of conversation. Others 
remark upon the troublesome nature of his 
cough. And so on, until his peculiarities and 
the company are both thoroughly exhausted. 

His friends and relations make matters still 
more unpleasant for the poor boy (friends and 



ON BEING SHY. 125 

relations are privileged to be more disagreeable 
than other people). Not content with making 
fun of him amongst themselves, they insist on 
his seeing the joke. They mimic and caricature 
him for his own edification. One, pretending to 
imitate him, goes outside, and comes in again in 
a ludicrously nervous manner, explaining to him 
afterward that that is the way he — meaning the 
shy fellow — walks into a room ; or, turning to 
him with, ** This is the way you shake hands," 
proceeds to go through a comic pantomine with 
the rest of the room, taking hold of every one's 
hand as if it were a hot plate, and flabbily drop- 
ping it again. And then they ask him why he 
blushes, and why he stammers, and why he 
always speaks in an almost inaudible tone, as if 
they thought he did it on purpose. Then one of 
them, sticking out his chest, and strutting about 
the room like a pouter-pigeon, suggests quite 
seriously that that is the style he should adopt. 
The old man slaps him on the back, and says, 
" Be bold, my boy. Don't be afraid of any one." 
The mother says, " Never do anything that you 
need be ashamed of, Algernon, and then you 
never need be ashamed of anything you do," 



126 ON BEING SJIY. 

and, beaming mildly at him, seems surprised at 
the clearness of her own logic. The boys tell 
him that he's '* worse than a girl," and the girls 
repudiate the implied slur upon their sex by 
indignantly exclaiming that they are sure no girl 
would be half as bad. 

They are quite right ; no girl would be. 
There is no such thing as a shy woman, or, at 
all events, I have never come across one, and, 
until I do, I shall not believe in them. I know 
that the generally accepted belief is quite the 
reverse. All women are supposed to be like 
timid, startled fawns, blushing and casting down 
their gentle eyes when looked at, and running 
away when spoken to ; while we men are sup- 
posed to be a bold and rollicky lot, and the 
poor, dear little women admire us for it, but are 
terribly afraid of us. It is a pretty theory, but, 
like most generally accepted theories, mere non- 
sense. The girl of twelve is self-contained, and 
as cool as the proverbial cucumber, while her 
brother of twenty stammers and stutters by her 
side. A woman will enter a concert-room late, 
interrupt the performance, and disturb the whole 
audience without moving a hair, while her hus- 



ON BEING SHY. 127 

band follows her, a crushed heap of apologizing 
misery. 

The superior nerve of women in all matters 
connected with love, from the casting of the 
first sheep's eye down to the end of the honey- 
moon, is too well acknowledged to need com- 
ment. Nor is the example a fair one to cite in 
the present instance, the positions not being 
equally balanced. Love is woman's business, 
and in " business " we all lay aside our natural 
weaknesses — the shyest man I ever knew was a 
photographic tout. 



ON BABIES, 

/^^H yes, I do — I know a lot about 'em. I 
^^ was one myself once — though not long, 
not so long as my clothes. They were very long, 
I recollect, and always in my way when I wanted 
to kick. Why do babies have such yards of un- 
necessary clothing? It is not a riddle. I really 
want to know. I never could understand it. Is 
it that the parents are ashamed of the size of the 
child, and wish to make believe that it is longer 
than it actually is ? I asked a nurse once why it 
was. She said : 

" Lor', sir, they always have long clothes, bless 
their little hearts." 

And when I explained that her answer, 
although doing credit to her feelings, hardly 
disposed of my difficulty, she replied: 

*' Lor', sir, you wouldn't have 'em in sJiort 
clothes, poor little dears ? " And she said it in a 
tone that seemed to imply I had suggested some 

unmanly outrage. 

128 



ON BABIES. 129 

Since then, I have felt shy at making inquiries 
on the subject, and the reason — if reason there 
be — is still a mystery to me. But, indeed, put- 
ting them in any clothes at all seems absurd to 
my mind. Goodness knows, there is enough of 
dressing and undressing to be gone through in 
life, without beginning it before we need ; and 
one would think that people who live in bed 
might, at all events, be spared the torture. 
Why wake the poor little wretches up in the 
morning to take one lot of clothes off, fix 
another lot on, and put them to bed again ; and 
then, at night, haul them out once more, merely 
to change everything back? And when all is done, 
what difference is there, I should like to know, 
between a baby's night-shirt and the thing it 
wears in the day-time ? 

Very likely, however, I am only making myself 
ridiculous — I often do ; so I am inforned — and I 
will, therefore, say no more upon this matter of 
clothes, except only that it would be of great 
convenience if some fashion were adopted, 
enabling you to tell a boy from a girl. 

At present it is most awkward. Neither hair, 
dress, nor conversation affords the slightest clue, 



I30 ON BABIES. 

and you are left to guess. By some mysterious 
law of Nature, you invariably guess wrong, and 
are thereupon regarded by all the relatives and 
friends as a mixture of fool and knave, the 
enormity of alluding to a male babe as ** she " 
being only equalled by the atrocity of referring 
to a female infant as " he." Whichever sex the 
particular child in question happens 7iot to 
belong to is considered as beneath contempt, 
and any mention of it is taken as a personal 
insult to the family. 

And, as you value your fair name, do not 
attempt to get out of the difficulty by talking of 
" it." There are various methods by which you 
may achieve ignominy and shame. By murder- 
ing a large and respected family in cold blood, 
and afterwards depositing their bodies in the 
water companies* reservoir, you will gain much 
unpopularity in the neighborhood of your crime, 
and even robbing a church will get you cordially 
disliked, especially by the vicar. But if you 
desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of 
scorn and hatred that a fellow human creature 
can pour out for you, let a young mother hear 
you call dear baby **it." 



ON BABIES. 131 

Your best plan is to address the article as 
** little angel." The noun ** angel " being of 
common gender, suits the case admirably, and 
the epithet is sure of being favorably received. 
" Pet " or " beauty" are useful for variety's sake, 
but " angel " is the term that brings you the 
greatest credit for sense and good feeling. The 
word should be preceded by a short giggle, and 
accompanied by as much smile as possible. 
And, whatever you do, don't forget to say that 
the child has got its father's nose. This 
" fetches " the parents (if I may be allowed a 
vulgarism) more than anything. They will pre- 
tend to laugh at the idea at first, and will say, 
** Oh, nonsense ! " You must then get excited, 
and insist that it is a fact. You need have no 
conscientious scruples on the subject, because 
the thing's nose really does resemble its father's — 
at all events quite as much as it does anything 
else in nature — being, as it is, a mere smudge. 

Do not despise these hints, my friends. There 
may come a time when, with mamma on one side 
and grandmamma on the other, a group of 
admiring young ladies (not admiring you though) 
behind, and a bald-headed dab of humanity in 



132 ON BABIES. 

front, you will be extremely thankful for some 
idea of what to say. A man — an unmarried 
man, that is — is never seen to such disadvantage 
as when undergoing the ordeal of '' seeing baby." 
A cold shudder runs down his back at the bare 
proposal, and the sickly smile with which he says 
how delighted he shall be, ought surely to move 
even a mother's heart, unless, as I am inclined to 
believe, the whole proceeding is a mere device, 
adopted by wives to discourage the visits of 
bachelor friends. 

It is a cruel trick, though, whatever its excuse 
may be. The bell is rung, and somebody sent to 
tell nurse to bring baby down. This is the sig- 
nal for ^11 the females present to commence 
talking "baby," during which time, you are left 
to your own sad thoughts, and the speculations 
upon the practicability of suddenly recollecting 
an important engagement, and the likelihood of 
your being believed if you do. Just when you 
have concocted an absurdly implausible tale 
about a man outside, the door opens, and a tall, 
severe-looking woman enters, carrying what atfirts 
sight appears to be a particularly skinny bolster, 
with the feathers all at one end. Instinct, how- 



ON BABIES. 133 

ever, tells you that this is the baby, and you rise 
with a miserable attempt at appearing eager. 
When the first gush of feminine enthusiasm with 
which the object in question is received has died 
out, and the number of ladies talking at once has 
been reduced to the ordinary four or five, the 
circle of fluttering petticoats divides, and room is 
made for you to step forward. This you do with 
much the same air that you would walk into the 
dock at Bow Street, and then, feeling unuttera- 
bly miserable, you stand solemnly staring at 
the child. There is dead silence, and you know 
that every one is waiting for you to speak. 
You try to think of something to say, but find, 
to your horror, that your reasoning faculties have 
left you. It is a moment of despair, and your 
evil genius, seizing the opportunity, suggests 
to you some of the most idiotic remarks that it 
is possible for a human being to perpetrate. 
Glancing round with an imbecile smile, you snig. 
geringly observe that " It hasn't got much hair, 
has it ? " Nobody answers you for a minute, 
but at last the stately nurse says with much 
gravity — " It is not customary for children five 
weeks old to have long hair." Another silence 



134 ON BABIES. 

follows this, and you feel you are being given a 
second chance, which you avail yourself of by 
inquiring if it can walk yet, or what they feed 
it on. 

By this time, you have got to be regarded as 
not quite right in your head, and pity is the only 
thing felt for you. The nurse, however, is de- 
termined that, insane or not, there shall be no 
shirking, and that you shall go through your task 
to the end. In the tones of a high priestess, 
directing some religious mystery, she says, hold- 
ing the bundle towards you, "Take her in your 
arms, sir." You are too crushed to offer any re- 
sistance, and so meekly accept the burden. "Put 
your arm more down her middle, sir," says the 
high priestess, and then all step back and watch 
you intently as though you were going to do a 
trick with it. 

What to do you know no more than you did 
what to say. It is certain somthing must be 
done, however, and the only thing that occurs to 
you is to heave the unhappy infant up and down 
to the accompaniment of "oopsee-daisy," or some 
remark of equal intelligence. 'T wouldn't jig her, 
sir, if I were you," says the nurse ; "a very little 



ON BABIES. 135 

Upsets her." You promptly decide not to jig her 
and sincerely hope that you have not gone too 
far already. 

At this point, the child itself, who has hitherto 
been regarding you with an expression of mingled 
horror and disgust, puts an end to the nonsense 
by beginning to yell at the top of its voice, at 
which the priestess rushes forward and snatches it 
from you with, "There, there, there ! What did 
ums do to ums?" "How very extraordinary!" 
you say pleasantly. "Whatever made it go off like 
that?" "Oh, why you must have done something 
to her I" says the mother indignantly; "the child 
wouldn't scream like that for nothing." It is evi- 
dent they think you have been running pins into 
it. 

The brat is calmed at last, and would no doubt 
remain quiet enough, only some mischievous busy- 
body points you out again with "Who's this, 
baby?" and the intelligent child, recognizing you, 
howls louder than ever. 

Whereupon, some fat old lady remarks that 
"It's strange how children take a dislike to any 
one." "Oh, they know," replies another mysteri- 
ously. "It's a wonderful thing," adds a third ; 



136 ON BABIES. 

and then everybody looks sideways at you, con- 
vinced you are a scoundrel of the blackest dye; 
and they glory in the beautiful idea that your 
true character, unguessed by your fellowmen, haf 
been discovered by the untaught instinct of a lit- 
tle child. 

Babies, though, with all their crimes and errors, 
are not without their use — not without use, surely, 
when they fill an empty heart ; not without use 
when, at their call, sunbeams of love break 
through care-clouded faces ; not without use when 
their little fingers press wrinkles into smiles. 

Odd little people ! They are the unconscious 
comedians of the world's great stage. They sup- 
ply the humor in life's all too heavy drama. Each 
one, a small but determined opposition to the 
order of things in general, is for ever doing the 
wrong thing, at the wrong time, in the wrong 
place, and in the wrong way. The nurse-girl, who 
sent Jenny to see what Tommy and Totty were 
doing, and "tell 'em they mustn't," knew infantile 
nature. Give an average baby a fair chance, and 
if it doesn't do something it oughtn't to, a doc- 
tor should be called in at once. 

They have a genius for doing the most ridicu- 



ON BABIES. 137 

lous things, and they do them in a grave, stoical 
manner that is irresistible The business-like air 
with which two of them will join hands and pro- 
ceed due east at a break-neck toddle, while an ex- 
citable big sister is roaring for them to follow her 
in a westerly direction, is most amusing — except, 
perhaps, for the big sister. They walk round a 
soldier, staring at his legs with the greatest curi- 
osity, and poke him too see if he is real. They 
stoutly maintain, against all argument, and much 
to the discomfort of the victim, that the bashful 
young man at the end of the 'bus is "dadda." A 
crowded street corner suggests itself to their 
minds as a favorable spot for the discussion of 
family affairs at a shrill treble. When in the mid- 
dle of crossing the road, they are seized with a 
sudden impulse to dance, and the doorstep of a 
busy shop is the place they always select for sit- 
ting down and taking off their shoes. 

When at home, they find the biggest walking- 
stick in the house, or an umbrella — open pre- 
ferred — of much assistance in getting upstairs. 
They discover that they love Mary Ann at the 
precise moment when that faithful domestic is 
blackleading the stove, and nothing will relieve 



13^ ON BABIES. 

their feelings but to embrace her then and there. 
With regard to food, their favorite dishes are 
coke and cat's meat. They nurse pussy upside 
down, and they show their affection for the dog 
by pulHng his tail. 

They are a deal of trouble, and they make a 
place untidy, and they cost a lot of money to 
keep ; but still you would not have the house 
without them. It would not be home without 
their noisy tongues and their mischief-making 
hands. Would not the rooms seem silent without 
their pattering feet, and might not you stray 
apart if no prattling voices called you together? 

It should be so, and yet I have sometimes 
thought the tiny hand seemed as a wedge, divid- 
ing. It is a bearish task to quarrel with that 
purest of all human affections — that perfecting 
touch to a woman's life — a mother's love. It is 
a holy love, that we coarser fibered men can hardly 
understand, and I would not be deemed to lack 
reverence for it when I say that surely it need 
not swallow up all other affection. The baby 
need not take your whole heart, like the rich man 
who walled up the desert well. Is there not an- 
other thirsty traveler standing by? 



OiV BABIES. 139 

Do not, in your desire to be a good mother, for- 
get to be a good wife. No need for all the 
thought and care to be only for one. Do not, 
whenever poor Edwin wants you to come out, an- 
swer indignantly, "What, and leave baby !" Do 
not spend all your evenings upstairs, and do not 
confine your conversation exclusively to whoop- 
ing-cough and measles. My dear little woman, 
the child is not going to die every time it sneezes, 
the house is not bound to get burnt down, and 
the nurse run away with a soldier, every time you 
go outside the front door; nor the cat sure to 
come and sit on the precious child's chest the mo- 
ment you leave the bedside. You worry yourself 
a good deal too much about that solitary chick, 
and you worry everybody else too. Try and 
think of your other duties, and your pretty face 
will not be always puckered into wrinkles, and 
there will be cheerfulness in the parlor as well as 
in the nursery. Think of your big baby a little. 
Dance him about a bit ; call him pretty names ; 
laugh at him now and then. It is only the first 
baby that takes up the whole of a woman's time. 
Five or six do not require nearly so much atten- 
tion as one. But before then the mischief has 



14C> O.V BABIES. 

been done. A house where there seems no room 
for him, and a wife too busy to think of him, have 
lost their hold on that so unreasonable husband 
of yours, and he has learnt to look elsewhere for 
comfort and companionship. 

But there, there, there ! I shall get myself the 
character of a baby hater, if I talk any more in 
this strain. And Heaven knows I am not one. 
Who could be, to look into the little innocent 
faces clustered in timid helplessness round those 
great gates that open down into the world? 

The world ! the small round world ! what a 
vast, mysterious place it must seem to baby 
eyes! What a trackless continent the back gar- 
den appears ! What marvelous explorations 
they make in the cellar under the stairs ! With 
what awe they gaze down the long street, won- 
dering, like us bigger babies, when we gaze up at 
the stars, where it all ends ! 

And down that longest street of all — that 
long, dim street of life that stretches out before 
them — what grave, old-fashioned looks they 
seem to cast ! What pitiful, frightened looks 
sometimes ! I saw a little mite sitting on a 
doorstep in a Soho slum one night, and I shall 



ON BABIES. 141 

never forget the look that the gas-lamp showed 
me on its wizen face — a look of dull despair, as 
if, from the squalid court, the vista of its own 
squalid life had risen, ghost-like, and struck its 
heart dead with horror. 

Poor little feet, just commencing the stony- 
journey ! We, old travelers, far down the road, 
can only pause to wave a hand to you. You 
come out of the dark mist, and we, looking back, 
see you, so tiny in the distance, standing on the 
brow of the hill, your arms stretched out toward 
us. God speed you ! We would stay and take 
your little hands in ours, but the murmur of the 
great sea is in our ears, and we may not linger. 
We must hasten down, for the shadowy ships are 
waiting to spread their sable sails. 



ON EA TING AND DRINKING, 

T ALWAYS was fond of eating and drinking, 
"*■ even as a child — especially eating, in those 
early days. I had an appetite then, also a diges- 
tion. I remember a dull-eyed, livid-complex- 
ioned gentleman coming to dine at our house 
once. He watched me eating for about five 
minutes, quite fascinated, seemingly, and then 
he turned to my father, with, " Does your boy 
ever suffer from dyspepsia? " 

" I never heard him complain of anything of 
that kind," replied my father. " Do you ever 
suffer from dyspepsia. Collywobbles ? " (They 
called me Collywobbles, but it was not my real 
name.) 

" No, pa," I answered. After which, I added, 
•* What is dyspepsia, pa ? " 

My livid-complexioned friend regarded me 
with a look of mingled amazement and envy. 
Then in a tone of infinite pity he slowly said, 
'' You will know — some day." 

142 



ON EATING AND DRINKING. 143 

My poor, dear mother used to say she liked to 
see me eat, and it has always been a pleasant 
reflection to me since, that I must have given 
her much gratification in that direction. A 
growing, healthy lad, taking plenty of exercise, 
and careful to restrain himself from indulging in 
too much study, can generally satisfy the most 
exacting expectations as regards his feeding 
powers. 

It is amusing to see boys eat, when you have 
not got to pay for it. Their idea of a square 
meal is a pound and a half of roast beef with five 
or six good-sized potatoes (soapy ones preferred, 
as being more substantial), plenty of greens, and 
four thick slices of Yorkshire pudding, followed 
by a couple of currant dumplings, a few green 
apples, a pen'orth of nuts, half-a-dozen jumbles, 
and a bottle of ginger beer. After that, they 
play at horses. 

How they must despise us men, who require 
to sit quiet for a couple of hours after dining off 
a spoonful of clear soup and the wing of a 
chicken ! 

But the boys have not all the advantages on 
their side. A boy never enjoys the luxury of be- 



144 ON EATING AND DRINKING. 

ing satisfied. A boy never feels full. He can 
never stretch out his legs, put his hands behind 
his head, and, closing his eyes, sink into the 
ethereal blissfulness that encompasses the well- 
dined man. A dinner makes no difference what- 
ever to a boy. To a man, it is as a good fairy's 
potion, and, after it, the world appears a brighter 
and a better place. A man who has dined satis- 
factorily experiences a yearnrng love toward all 
his fellow creatures. He strokes the cat quite 
gently, and calls it " poor pussy," in tones full of 
the tenderest emotion. He sympathizes with 
the members of the German band outside, and 
wonders if they are cold ; and, for the moment, 
he does not even hate his wife's relations. 

A good dinner brings out all the softer side of 
a man. Under its genial influence, the gloomy 
and morose become jovial and chatty. Sour, 
starchy individuals, who all the rest of the day 
go about looking as if they lived on vinegar and 
Epsom salts, break out into wreathed smiles after 
dinner, and exhibit a tendency to pat small child- 
ren on the head, and to talk to them — vaguely 
— about sixpences. Serious young men thaw, 
and become mildly cheerful; and snobbish young 



ON EATING AND DRINKING. 1 45 

men, of the heavy moustache type, forget to 
make themselves objectionable. 

I always feel sentimental myself after dinnen 
It is the only time when I can properly appreci- 
ate love stories. Then, when the hero clasps 
*' her " to his heart in one last wild embrace, and 
stifles a sob, I feel as sad as though I had dealt 
at whist, and turned up only a deuce ; and, when 
the heroine dies in the end, I weep. If I read 
the same tale early in the morning, I should sneer 
at it. Digestion, or rather indigestion, has a 
marvelous effect upon the heart. If I want to 
write anything very pathetic — I mean, if I want 
to try to write anything very pathetic — I eat a 
large plateful of hot buttered muffins about an 
hour beforehand, and, then, by the time I sit 
down to my work, a feeling of unutterable mel- 
ancholy has come over me. I picture heart- 
broken lovers parting forever at lonely wayside 
stiles, while the sad twilight deepens around 
them, and only the tinkling of a distant sheep 
bell breaks the sorrow-laden silence. Old men 
sit and gaze at withered flowers till their sight 
is dimmed by the mist of tears. Little dainty 
maidens wait and watch at open casements ; but, 



14^ 01^ EATING AND DRINKING. 

"he Cometh not," and the heavy years roll by, 
and the sunny gold tresses wear white and thin. 
The babies that they dandled have become grown 
men and women with podgy torments of their 
own, and the playmates that they laughed with 
are lying very silent under the waving grass. 
But still they wait and watch, till the dark shad- 
ows of the unknown night steal up and gather 
round them, and the world with its childish 
troubles fades from their aching eyes. 

I see pale corpses tossed on white-foamed 
waves, and death-beds stained with bitter tears, 
and graves in trackless deserts. I hear the wild 
wailing of women, the low moaning of the little 
children, the dry sobbing of strong men. It's all 
the muffins. I could not conjure up one melan- 
choly fancy upon a mutton chop and a glass of 
champagne. 

A full stomach is a great aid to poetry, and, 
indeed, no sentiment of any kind can stand upon 
an empty one. We have not time or inclination 
to indulge in fanciful troubles, until we have got 
rid of our real misfortunes. We do not sigh over 
dead dicky-birds with the bailiff in the house; 
and, when we do not know where on earth to get 



ON EATING AND DRINKING. 147 

our next shilling from, we do not worry as to 
whether our mistress's smiles are cold, or hot, or 
luke-warm, or anything else about them. 

Foolish people — when I say "foolish people" in 
this contemptuous way, I mean people who enter- 
tain different opinions to mine. If there is one 
person I do despise more than another, it is the 
man who does not think exactly the same on all 
topics as I do. Foolish people, I say, then, who 
have never experienced much of either, will tell 
you that mental distress is far more agonizing 
than bodily. Romantic and touching theory ! so 
comforting to the love-sick young sprig who 
looks down patronizingly at some poor devil with 
a white starved face, and thinks to himself, "Ah, 
how happy you are compared with me !" so 
soothing to fat old gentlemen who cackle about 
the superiority of poverty over riches. But it is 
all nonsense — all cant. An aching head soon 
makes one forget an aching heart. A broken fin- 
ger will drive away all recollections of an empty 
chair. And when a man feels really hungry, he 
does not feel anything else. 

We sleek, well-fed folk can hardly realize what 
feeling hungry is like. We know what it is to have 



148 ON EATING AND DRINKING. 

no appetite, and not to care for the dainty victu- 
als placed before us, but we do not understand 
what it means to sicken for food — to die for 
bread while others waste it — to gaze with fam- 
ished eyes upon coarse fare steaming behind 
dingy windows, longing for a pen'orth of pease 
pudding, and not having the penny to buy it — to 
feel that a crust would be delicious, and that a 
bone would be a banquet. 

Hunger is a luxury to us, a piquant, flavor- 
giving sauce. It is well worth while to get hun- 
gry and thirsty, mereiy to discover how much 
gratification can be obtained from eating and 
drinking. If you wish to thoroughly enjoy your 
dinner, take a thirty-mile country walk after break- 
fast, and don't touch anything till you get back. 
How your eyes will glisten at sight of the white 
table-cloth and steaming dishes then ! With 
what a sigh of content you will put down the 
empty beer tankard, and take up your knife and 
fork ! And how comfortable you feel afterwards, 
as you push back your chair, light a cigar, and 
beam round upon everybody. 

Make sure, however, when adopting this plan, 
that the good dinner is really to be had at the 



ON EATING AND DRINKING. 149 

end, or the disappointment is trying. I remem- 
ber once a friend and I — dear old Joe, it was. 
Ah! how we lose one another in life's mist. It 
must be eight years since I last saw Joseph 
Taboys. How pleasant it would be to meet his 
jovial face again, to clasp his strong hand, and to 
hear his cheery laugh once more ! He owes me 
fourteen shillings, too. Well, we were on a holi- 
day together, and one morning we had breakfast 
early, and started for a tremendous long walk. 
We had ordered a duck for dinner over night. 
We said, "Get a big one, because we shall come 
home awfully hungry" ; and, as we were going 
out, our landlady came up in great spirits. She 
said, "I have got you gentlemen a duck, if you 
like. If you get through that, you'll do well"; 
and she held up a bird about the size of a door- 
mat. We chuckled at the sight, and said we 
would try. We said it with self-conscious pride, 
like men who know their own power. Then we 
started. 

We lost our way, of course. I always do in 
the country, and it does make me so wild, 
because it is no use asking direction of any of the 
people you meet. One might as well inquire 



150 ON EATING AND DRINKING. 

of a lodging-house slavey the way to make beds, 
as expect a country bumpkin to know the road 
to the next village. You have to shout the ques- 
tion about three times, before the sound of your 
voice penetrates his skull. At the third time, he 
slowly raises his head, and stares blankly at you. 
You yell it at him then for a fourth time, and he 
repeats it after you. He ponders while you 
could count a couple of hundred, after which, 
speaking at the rate of three words a minute, he 

fancies you "couldn't do better than ." 

Here he catches sight of another idiot coming 
down the road, and bawls out to him the particu- 
lars, requesting his advice. The two then argue 
the case for a quarter of an hour or so, and finally 
agree that you had better go straight down the 
lane, round to the right, and cross by the third 
stile, and keep to the left by old Jimmy Milcher's 
cow-shed, and across the seven-acre field, and 
through the gate by Squire Grubbin's hay-stack, 
keeping the bridle-path for a while, till you come 
opposite the hill where the windmill used to be — 
but its gone now — and round to the right, leav- 
ing Stiggin's plantation behind you ; and you 
say "Thank you," and go away with a splitting 



ON EATING AND DRINKING. 151 

headache, but without the faintest notion of your 
way, the only clear idea you have on the subject 
being that somewhere or other there is a stile 
which has to be got over; and, at the next turn, 
you come upon four stiles, all leading in different 
directions ! 

We had undergone this ordeal two or three 
times. We had tramped over fields. We had 
waded through brooks, and scrambled over 
hedges and walls. We had had a row as to 
whose fault it was that we had first lost our way. 
We had got thoroughly disagreeable, footsore, 
and weary. But, throughout it all, the hope of 
that duck kept us up. A fairy-like vision, it 
floated before our tired eyes, and drew us on- 
ward. The thought of it was as a trumpet call 
to the fainting. We talked of it, and cheered 
each other with our recollections of it. '* Come 
along," we said, " the duck will be spoilt." 

We felt a strong tempation, at one point, to 
turn into a village inn as we passed, and have a 
cheese and a few loaves between us ; but we 
heroically restrained ourselves : we should enjoy 
the duck all the better for being famished. 

We fancied we smelt it when we got into the 



152 ON EATING AND DRINKING. 

town and did the last quarter of a mile in three 
minutes. We rushed upstairs, and washed our- 
selves, and changed our clothes, and came down, 
and pulled our chairs up to the table, and sat and 
rubbed our hands while the landlady removed 
the covers, when I seized the knife and fork and 
started to carve. 

It seemed to want a lot of carving. I strug- 
gled with it for about five minutes without 
making the slightest impression, and then Joe, 
who had been eating potatoes, wanted to know if 
it wouldn't be better for some one to do the job 
that understood carving. I took no notice of 
his foolish remark, but attacked the bird again ; 
and so vigorously this time, that the animal left 
the dish, and took refuge in the fender. 

We soon had it out of that though, and I was 
prepared to make another effort. But Joe was 
getting unpleasant. He said that if he had 
thought we were to have a game of blind hockey 
with the dinner, he would have got a bit of bread 
and cheese outside. 

I was too exhausted to argue. I laid down 
the knife and fork with dignity, and took a side 
seat : and Joe went for the wretched creature 



ON EATING AND DRINKING. 153 

He worked away, in silence for a while, and then 
he muttered, *' Damn the duck," and took his 
coat off. 

We did break the thing up at length, with the 
aid of a chisel ; but it was perfectly impossible to 
eat it, and we had to make a dinner off the vege- 
tables and an apple tart. We tried a mouthful 
of the duck, but it was like eating india-rubber. 

It was a wicked sin to kill that drake. But 
there ! there's no respect for old institutions in 
this country. 

I started this paper with the idea of writing 
about eating and drinking, but I seem to have 
confined my remarks entirely to eating as yet. 
Well, you see, drinking is one of those subjects 
with which it is unadvisable to appear too well 
acquainted. The days are gone by when it was 
considered manly to go to bed intoxicated every 
night, and a clear head and a firm hand no longer 
draw down upon their owner the reproach of 
effeminacy. On the contrary, in these sadly 
degenerate days, an evil-smelling breath, a blotchy 
face, a reeling gait, and a husky voice are regarded 
as the hall-marks of the cad rather than of the 
gentleman. 



154 ON EATING AND DRINKING. 

Even nowadays, though, the thirstiness of 
mankind is something supernatural. We are for 
ever drinking on one excuse or another. A man 
never feels comfortable unless he has a glass 
before him. We drink before meals, and with 
meals, and after meals. We drink when we meet 
a friend, also when we part from a friend. We 
drink when we are talking, when we are reading, 
and when we are thinking. We drink one an- 
other's healths, and spoil our own. We drink 
the Queen, and the Army, and the Ladies, and 
everybody else that is drinkable ; and, I believe, 
if the supply ran short, we should drink our 
mothers-in-law. 

By-the-way, we never eat anybody's health, 
always drink it. Why should we not stand up 
now and then and eat a tart to somebody's suc- 
cess ? 

To me, I confess, the constant necessity of 
drinking under which the majority of men labor 
is quite unaccountable. I can understand people 
drinking to drown care, or to drive away madden- 
ing thoughts, well enough. I can understand the 
ignorant masses loving to soak themselves in 
drink — oh, yes, it's very shocking that they 
should, of course — very shocking to us who live 



ON' EA TING AND DRINKING. 155 

in cosy homes, with all the graces and pleasures 
of life around us, that the dwellers in damp cellars 
and windy attics should creep from their dens of 
misery into the warmth and glare of the public- 
house bar, and seek to float for a brief space away 
from their dull world upon a Lethe stream of gin. 

But think, before you hold up your hands in 
horror at their ill-living, what *' life " for these 
wretched creatures really means. Picture the 
squalid misery of their brutish existence, dragged 
on from year to year in the narrow, noisome room 
where, huddled like vermin in sewers, they welter, 
and sicken, and sleep ; where dirt-grimed children 
scream and fight, and sluttish, shrill-voiced women 
cuff, and curse, and nag ; where the street outside 
teems with roaring filth, and the house around is 
a bedlam of riot and stench. 

Think what a sapless stick this fair flower of 
life must be to them, devoid of mind and soul. 
The horse in his stall scents the sweet hay, and 
munches the ripe corn contentedly. The watch- 
dog in his kennel blinks at the grateful sun, 
dreams of a glorious chase over the dewy fields, 
and wakes with a yelp of gladness to greet a 
caressing hand. But the clod-like life of these 
human logs never knows one ray of light. From 



156 OA' EATING AND DRINKING. 

the hour when they crawl from their comfortless 
bed to the hour when they lounge back into it 
agaip, they never live one moment of real life. 
Recreation, amusement, companionship, they 
know not the meaning of. Joy, sorrow, laughter, 
tears, love, friendship, longing, despair, are idle 
words to them. From the day when their baby 
eyes first look out upon their sordid world to the 
day when, with an oath, they close them for ever, 
and their bones are shoveled out of sight, they 
never warm to one touch of human sympathy, 
never thrill to a single thought, never start to a 
single hope. In the name of the God of mercy 
let them pour the maddening liquor down their 
throats, and feel for one brief moment that they 
live ! 

Ah ! we may talk sentiment as much as we like, 
but the stomach is the real seat of happiness in 
this world. The kitchen is the chief temple 
wherein we worship, its roaring fire is our vestal 
flame, and the cook is our great high-priest. He 
is a mighty magician and a kindly one. He 
soothes away all sorrow and care. He drives 
forth all enmity, gladdens all love. Our God is 
great, and the cook is his prophet. Let us eat, 
drink, and be merry. 



ON ^'FURNISHED A PAR TMENTSr 

"y^^H, you have some rooms to let." 
VJ ''Mother!" 

"Well, what is it?" 

** 'Ere's a gentleman about the rooms.*' 

"Ask 'im in. I'll be up in a minute." 

"Will yer step inside, sir? Mother'll be up in 
a minute." 

So you step inside, and, after a minute, 
"mother" comes slowly up the kitchen stairs, 
untying her apron as she comes, and calling down 
instructions to some one below about the pota- 
toes. 

"Good-morning, sir," says "mother," with a 
washed-out smile ; "will you step this way, 
please?" 

"Oh, it's hardly worth while my coming up," 
you say ; "what sort of rooms are they, and how 
much?" 

"Well," says the landlady, "if you'll step up- 
stairs, I'll show them to you." 

157 



158 (9iV " FURNISHED APAR TMEN 75 " 

So, with a protesting murmur, meant to imply 
that any waste of time complained of hereafter 
must not be laid to your charge, you follow 
"mother" upstairs. 

At the first landing, you run up against a pail 
and a broom, whereupon "mother" expatiates upon 
the unreliability of servant-girls, and bawls over 
the balusters for Sarah to come and take them 
away at once. When you get outside the rooms, 
she pauses, with her hand upon the door, to 
explain to you that they are rather untidy just at 
present, as the last lodger left only yesterday; 
and she also adds that this is their cleaning day — 
'it always is. With this understanding, you enter, 
and both stand solemnly feasting your eyes upon 
the scene before you. The rooms cannot be said 
to appear inviting. Even "mother's" face be- 
trays no admiration. Untenanted "furnished 
apartments," viewed in the morning sunlight, do 
not inspire cheery sensations. There is a lifeless 
air about them. It is a very different thing when 
you have settled down and are living in them. 
With your old familiar household gods to greet 
your gaze whenever you glance up, and all your 
little nick-nacks spread around you — with the 



OiV "FURNISHED APARTMENTS:' 159 

photos of all the girls that you have loved and 
lost ranged upon the mantel-piece, and half a 
dozen disreputable-looking pipes scattered about 
in painfully prominent positions — with one carpet 
slipper peeping from beneath the coal-box, and 
the other perched on the top of the piano — with 
the well-known pictures to hide the dingy walls, 
and these dear old friends, your books, higgledy- 
piggledy all over the place — with the bits of old 
blue china that your mother prized, and the 
screen she worked in those far bygone days, 
when the sweet old face was laughing and young, 
and the white soft hair tumbled in gold-brown 
curls from under the coal-scuttle bonnet — 

Ah, old screen, what a gorgeous personage you 
must have been in your young days, when the 
tulips and roses and lilies (all growing from one 
stem) were fresh in their glistening sheen ! Many 
a summer and winter have come and gone since 
then, my friend, and you have played with the 
dancing firelight, until you have grown sad and 
gray. Your brilliant colors are fast fading now, 
and the envious moths have gnawed your silken 
threads. You are withering away like the dead 
hands that wove you. Do you ever think of 



i6o ON ''FURNISHED APARTMENTS:- 

those dead hands? You seem so grave and 
thoughtful, sometimes, that I almost think you 
do. Come, you and I and the deep-glowing 
embers, let us talk together. Tell me, in your 
silent language, what you remember of those 
young days, when you lay on my little mother's 
lap, and her girlish fingers played with your rain- 
bow tresses. Was there never a lad near, some- 
times — never a lad who would seize one of those 
little hands to smother it with kisses, and who 
would persist in holding it, thereby sadly inter- 
fering with the progress of your making? Was 
not your frail existence often put in jeopardy by 
this same clumsy, headstrong lad, who would toss 
you disrespectfully aside that he — not satisfied 
with one — might hold both hands, and gaze up 
into the loved eyes? I can see that lad now 
through the haze of the flickering twilight. He 
is an eager, bright-eyed boy, with pinching, dandy 
shoes and tight-fitting smalls, snowy shirt frill 
and stock, and — oh ! such curly hair. A wild, 
light-hearted boy ! Can he be the great, grave 
gentleman upon whose stick I used to ride cross- 
legged, the care-worn man into whose thoughtful 
face I used to gaze with childish reverence, and 



ON '' FURNISHED apartments:' i6i 

whom I used to call "father?" You say "y^s," 
old screen; but are you quite sure? It is a seri- 
ous charge you are bringing; can it be possible? 
Did he have to kneel down in those wonderful 
smalls, and pick you up, and re-arrange you, 
before he was forgiven, and his curly head 
smoothed by my mother's little hand? Ah! old 
screen, and did the lads and the lassies go mak- 
ing love fifty years ago just as they do now? 
Are men and women so unchanged? Did little 
maiden's hearts beat the same under pearl em- 
broidered bodices as they do under Mother Hub- 
bard cloaks? Have steel casques and chimney- 
pot hats made no difference to the brains that 
work beneath them? Oh, Time ! great Chronos! 
and is this your power? Have you dried up 
seas and levelled mountains, and left the tiny 
human heart-strings to defy you? Ah, yes! they 
were spun by a Mightier than thou, and they 
stretch beyond your narrow ken, for their ends 
are made fast in eternity. Ay, you may mow 
down the leaves and the blossoms, but the roots 
of life lie too deep for your sickle to sever. You 
refashion Nature's garments, but you cannot vary 
by a jot the throbbings of her pulse. The world 



1 6 2 ON '' FURNISHED APAR TMENTS." 

rolls round obedient to your laws, but the heart 
of man is not of your kingdom, for in its birth- 
place "a thousand years are but as yesterday." 

I am getting away, though, I fear, from my 
" furnished apartments," and I hardly know how 
to get back. But I have some excuse for my 
meanderings this time. It is a piece of old fur- 
niture that has led me astray, and fancies gather, 
somehow, round old furniture, like moss around 
old stones. One's chairs and tables get to be 
almost part of one's life, and to seem like quiet 
friends. What strange tales the wooden-headed 
old fellows could tell, did they but choose to 
speak ! At what unsuspected comedies and 
tragedies have they not assisted ! What bitter 
tears have been sobbed into that old sofa cush- 
ion ! What passionate whisperings the settee 
must have overheard ! 

New furniture has no charms for me, compared 
with old. It is the old things that we love — the 
old faces, the old books, the old jokes. New 
furniture can make a palace, but it takes old fur- 
niture to make a home. Not merely old in itself, 
lodging-house furniture generally is that, but it 
must be old to us, old in associations and recol- 






ON " FURNISHED A PARTMENTS. " 163 

lections. The furniture of furnished apartments, 
however ancient it may be in reality, is new to 
our eyes, and we feel as though we could never 
get on with it. As, too, in the case of all fresh 
acquaintances, whether wooden or human (and 
there is very little difference between the two 
species sometimes) everything impresses you with 
its worst aspect. The knobby woodwork and 
shiny horse-hair covering of the easy-chair sug- 
gest anything but ease. The mirror is smoky. 
The curtains want washing. The carpet is frayed. 
The table looks as if it would go over the 
instant anything was rested on it. The grate is 
cheerless, the wall-paper hideous. The ceiling 
appears to have had coffee spilt all over it, and 
the ornaments — well, they are worse than the 
wall-paper. 

There must surely be some special and secret 
manufactory for the production of lodging-house 
ornaments. Precisely the same articles are to be 
found at every lodging-house all over the king- 
dom, and they are never seen anywhere else. There 
are the two — what do you call them ? they stand 
one at each end of the mantelpiece, where they 
are never safe; and they are hung round with 



1 64 ON '' FURNISHED AFAR TMENTS. " 

long triangular slips of glass that clank against 
one another and make you nervous. In the com- 
moner class of rooms, these works of art are sup- 
plemented by a couple of pieces of china which 
might each be meant to represent a cow sitting 
upon its hind legs, or a model of the temple of 
Dina at Ephesus, or a dog, or anything else you 
like to fancy. Somewhere about the room you 
come across a bilious-looking object, which, at 
first, you take to be a lump of dough, left about 
by one of the children, but which, on scrutiny, 
seems to resemble an underdone Cupid. This 
thing the landlady calls a statue. Then there is 
a "sampler" worked by some idiot related to the 
family, a picture of the '' Huguenots," two or 
three Scripture texts, and a highly-framed and 
glazed certificate to the effect that the father has 
been vaccinated, or is an Oddfellow, or something 
of that sort. 

You examine these various attractions, and 
then dismally ask what the rent is. 

"That's rather a good deal," you say, on hear- 
ing the figure. 

** Well, to tell you the truth," answers the land- 
lady with a sudden burst of candor, " I've always 



ON ''FURNISHED APARTMENTS^ 165 

had " — (mentioning a sum a good deal in excess 
of the first named amount), *' and before that I 
used to have " — (a still higher figure). 

What the rent of apartments must have been 
twenty years ago makes one shudder to think of. 
Every landlady makes you feel thoroughly 
ashamed of yourself by informing you, whenever 
the subject crops up, that she used to get twice 
as much for her rooms as you are paying. Young 
men lodgers of the last generation must have 
been of a wealthier class than they are now, or 
they must have ruined themselves. I should 
have had to live in an attic. 

Curious, that in lodgings, the rule of life is 
reserved. The higher you get up in the world, 
the lower you come down in your lodgings. On 
the lodging-house ladder, the poor man is at the 
top, the rich man underneath. You start in the 
attic, and work your way down to the first-floor. 

A good many great men have lived in attics, 
and some have died there. Attics, says the 
dictionary, are " places where lumber is stored," 
and the world has used them to store a good deal 
of its lumber in at one time or another. Its 
preachers and painters and poets, its deep-browed 



l66 ON " FURNISHED apartments:' 

men who will find out things, its fire-eyed men 
who will tell truths that no one wants to hear — 
these are the lumber that the world hides away in 
its attics. Haydn grew up in an attic, and Chat- 
terton starved in one. Addison and Goldsmith 
wrote in garrets. Faraday and De Quincey knew 
them well. Dr. Johnson camped cheerfully in 
them, sleeping soundly — too soundly sometimes 
— upon their truckle beds, like the sturdy old 
soldier of fortune that he was, inured to hardship 
and all careless of himself. Dickens spent his 
youth among them, Morland his old age — alas ! a 
drunken, premature old age. Hans Anderson, 
the fairy king, dreamt his sweet fancies beneath 
their sloping roofs. Poor, wayw^ard-hearted Col- 
lins leant his head upon their crazy tables ; prig- 
gish Benjamin Franklin ; Savage, the wrong- 
headed, much troubled, when he could afford any 
softer bed than a doorstep ; young Bloomfield, 
" Bobby" Burns, Hogarth, Watts the engineer — 
the roll is endless. Ever since the habitations 
of men were reared two stories high, has the 
garret been the nursery of genius. 

No one who honors the aristocracy of mind 
can feel ashamed of acquaintanceship with them. 



ON ''FURNISHED APARTMENTS:' 167 

Their damp-stained walls are sacred to the mem- 
ory of noble names. If all the wisdom of the 
world and all its art — all the spoils that it has 
won from Nature, all the fire that it has snatched 
from Heaven — were gathered together and 
divided into heaps, and we could point and say, 
for instance : — These mighty truths were flashed 
forth in the brilliant salon, amidst the ripple of 
light laughter and the sparkle of bright eyes; and 
This deep knowledge was dug up in the quiet 
study, where the bust of Pallas looks serenely 
down on the leather-scented shelves ; and This 
heap belongs to the crowded street ; and That 
to the daisied field, — the heap that would tower 
up high above the rest, as a mountain above hills, 
would be the one at which we should look up 
and say : this noblest pile of all — thes£ glorious 
paintings and this wondrous music, these trumpet 
words, these solemn thoughts, these daring deeds, 
they were forged and fashioned amidst misery 
and pain in the sordid squalor of the city garret. 
There, from their eyries, while the world heaved 
and throbbed below, the kings of men sent forth 
their eagle thoughts to wing their flight through 
the ages. There, where the sunlight streaming 



1 68 ON '' FURNISHED APAR TMENTS. " 

through the broken panes, fell on rotting boards 
and crumbling walls; there, from their lofty 
thrones, those rag-clothed Joves have hurled their 
thunderbolts and shaken, before now, the earth 
to its foundations. 

Huddle them up in your lumber-rooms, oh, 
world ! Shut them fast in, and turn the key of 
poverty upon them. Weld close the bars, and 
let them fret their hero lives away within the 
narrow cage. Leave them there to starve, and 
rot, and die. Laugh at the frenzied beatings of 
their hands against the door. Roll onward in 
your dust and noise, and pass them by, for- 
gotten. 

But take care, lest they turn and sting you. 
All do not, like the fabled Phoenix, warble sweet 
melodies in their agony ; sometimes they spit 
venom — venom you must breathe whether you 
will or no, for you cannot seal their mouths, 
though you may fetter their limbs. You can 
lock the door upon them, but they burst open 
their shaky lattices, and call out over the house- 
tops so that men cannot but hear. You 
hounded wild Rousseau into the meanest garret 
of the Rue St. Jacques, and jeered at his angry 



ON ''FURNISHED APARTMENTS." 169 

shrieks. But the thin, piping tones swelled, a 
hundred years later, into the sullen roar of the 
French Revolution, and civilization to this day 
is quivering to the reverberations of his voice. 

As for myself, however, I like an attic. Not 
to live in : as residences they are inconvenient. 
There is too much getting up and down stairs 
connected with them to please me. It puts one 
unpleasantly in mind of the tread-mill. The 
form of the ceiling offers too many facilities for 
bumping your head, and too few for shaving. 
And the note of the tom cat, as he sings to his 
love in the stilly night, outside on the tiles, 
becomes positively distasteful when heard so 
near. 

No, for living in, give me a suite of rooms on 
the first floor of a Piccadilly mansion (I wish 
somebody would !); but, for thinking in, let me 
have an attic up ten flights of stairs in the 
densest quarter of the city. I have all Herr 
Teufelsdrockh's affection for attics. There is a 
sublimity about their loftiness. I love to " sit 
at ease and look down upon the wasps' nest 
beneath"; to listen to the dull murmur of the 
human tide, ebbing and flowing ceaselessly 



lyo ON '' FURNISHED apartments:* 

through the narrow streets and lanes below. 
How small men seem, how like a swarm of ants 
sweltering in endless confusion on their tiny 
hill ! How petty seems the work on which they 
are hurrying and skurrying ! How childishly 
they jostle against one another, and turn to snarl 
and scratch ! They jabber and screech and 
curse, but their puny voices do not reach up 
here. They fret, and fume, and rage, and pant, 
and die ; " but I, mein Werther, sit above it all ; 
I am alone with the stars." 

The most extraordinary attic I ever came 
across was one a friend and I once shared, many 
years ago. Of all eccentrically planned things, 
from Bradshaw to the maze at Hampton Court, 
that room was the eccentricalist. The architect 
who designed it must have been a genius, though 
I cannot help thinking that his talents would 
have been better employed in contriving puzzles 
than in shaping human habitations. No figure 
in Euclid could give any idea of that apartment. 
It contained seven corners, two of the walls 
sloped to a point, and the window was just over 
the fireplace. The only possible position for the 
bedstead was between the door and the cup- 



ON " FURNISHED APAR TMENT^." 1 7 1 

board. To get anything out of the cupboard, 
we had to scramble over the bed, and a large 
percentage of the various commodities thus 
obtained were absorbed by the bedclothes. 
Indeed, so many things were spilled, and 
dropped upon the bed that, towards night time, 
it had become a sort of small co-operative store. 
Coal was what it always had most in stock. We 
used to keep our coal in the bottom part of the 
cupboard, and, when any was wanted, we had to 
climb over the bed, fill a shovelful, and then 
crawl back. It was an exciting moment when 
we reached the middle of the bed. We would 
hold our breath, fix our eyes upon the shovel, 
and poise ourselves for the last move. The next 
instant, we, and the coals, and the shovel, and 
the bed would be all mixed up together. 

I've heard of the people going into raptures 
over beds of coal. We slept in one every night, 
and were not in the least stuck up about it. 

But our attic, unique though it was, had by no 
means exhausted the architect's sense of humor. 
The arrangement of the whole house was a mar- 
vel of originality. All the doors opened out- 
wards, so that if any one wanted to leave a room 



172 OiV " FURNISHED AFAR TMENTSr 

at the same moment that you were coming down- 
stairs it was unpleasant for you. There was no 
ground-floor, its ground-floor belonged to a house 
in the next court, and the front door opened di- 
rect upon a flight of stairs leading down to the 
cellar. Visitors, on entering the house, would 
suddenly shoot past the person who had an- 
swered the door to them, and disappear down 
these stairs. Those of a nervous temperament 
used to imagine that it was a trap laid for them, 
and would shout murder, as they lay on their 
backs at the bottom, till somebody came and 
picked them up. 

It is a long time ago, now, that I last saw the 
inside of an attic. I have tried various floors 
since, but I have not found that they have made 
much difference to me. Life tastes much the 
same, whether we quaff it from a golden goblet, 
or drink it out of a stone mug. The hours come 
laden with the same mixture of joy and sorrow, 
no matter where we wait for them. A waistcoat 
of broadcloth or of fustian is alike to an aching 
heart, and we laugh no merrier on velvet cush- 
ions than we did on wooden chairs. Often have 
I sighed in those low-ceiling'd rooms, yet disap- 



ON ** FURNISHED APAR TMENTSr 1 73 

pointments have come neither less nor lighter 
since I quitted them. Life works upon a com- 
pensating balance, and the happiness we gain in 
one direction we lose in another. As our means 
increase, so do our desires ; and we ever stand 
midway between the two. When we reside in an 
attic, we enjoy a supper of fried fish and stout. 
When we occupy the first floor, it takes an elab- 
orate dinner at the " Continental " to give us the 
same amount of satisfaction. 



ON DRESS AND DEPOR TMENT. 

'T^HEY say — people who ought to be ashamed 
-■■ of themselves do — that the consciousness 
of being well dressed imparts a blissfulness to 
the human heart that religion is powerless to be- 
stow. I am afraid these cynical persons are 
sometimes correct. I know that when I was a 
very young man (many, many years ago, as the 
story-books say), and wanted cheering up, I used 
to go and dress myself in all my best clothes. If I 
had been annoyed in any manner — if my washer- 
woman had discharged me, for instance ; or my 
blank verse poem had been returned for the tenth 
time, with the editor's compliments, **and re- 
grets that owing to want of space he is unable to 
avail himself of kind offer"; or I had been 
snubbed by the woman I loved as man never 
loved before. By the way, it's really extraor- 
dinary what a variety of ways of loving there 
must be. We all do it as it was never done be- 
fore. I don't know how our great-grandchildren 

174 



OjV dress and deportment. 175 

will manage. They will have to do it on their 
heads by their time, if they persist in not clash- 
ing with any previous method. 

Well, as I was saying, when these unpleasant 
sort of things happened, and I felt crushed, I put 
on all my best clothes, and went out. It brought 
back my vanishing self-esteem. In a glossy new 
hat, and a pair of trousers with a fold down the 
front (carefully preserved by keeping them under 
the bed — I don't mean on the floor, you know, 
but between the bed and the mattress), I felt I 
was somebody, and that there were other wash- 
erwomen : aye, and even other girls to love, and 
who would perhaps appreciate a clever, good- 
looking young fellow. / didn't care : that was 
my reckless way. I would make love to other 
maidens, I felt that in those clothes I could do it. 

They have a wonderful deal to do with court- 
ing, clothes have. It is half the battie. At all 
events, the young man thinks so, and it generally 
takes him a couple of hours to get himself up for 
the occasion. His first half-hour is occupied in 
trying to decide whether to wear his light suit 
with a cane and drab billycock, or his black tails 
with a chimney-pot hat and his new umbrella. 



176 ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT, 

He is sure to be unfortunate in either decision. 
If he wears his light suit and takes the stick, it 
comes on to rain, and he reaches the house in a 
damp and muddy condition, and spends the 
evening trying to hide his boots. If, on the 
other hand, he decides in favor of the top hat 
and umbrella — nobody would ever dream of 
going out in a top hat without an umbrella : it 
would be like letting Baby (bless it) toddle out 
without its nurse. How I do hate a top hat ! 
One lasts me a very long while, I can tell you. 
I only wear it when — well, never mind when I 
wear it. It lasts me a very long while. I've had 
my present one five years. It w^as rather old- 
fashioned last summer, but the shape has come 
round again now, and I look quite stylish. 

But to return to our young man and his court- 
ing. If he starts off with the top hat and um- 
brella, the afternoon turns out fearfully hot, and 
the perspiration takes all the soap out of his 
moustache, and converts the beautifully-arranged 
curl over his forehead into a limp wisp, resem- 
bling a lump of seaweed. The Fates are never 
favorable to the poor wretch. If he does by any 
chance reach the door in proper condition, she 



OA^ DRESS AND DEPORTMENT, I77 

has gone out with her cousin, and won't be back 
till late. 

How a young lover, made ridiculous by the 
gawkiness of modern costume, must envy the 
picturesque gallants of seventy years ago ! 
Look at them (on the Christmas cards), with 
their curly hair and natty hats, their well-shaped 
legs encased in smalls, their dainty Hessian 
boots, their ruffling frills, their canes, and dang- 
ling seals. No wonder the little maiden in the 
big poke bonnet and the light blue sash, casts 
down her eyes, and is completely won. Men 
could win hearts in clothes like that. But what 
can you expect from baggy trousers and a 
monkey jacket? 

Clothes have more effect upon us than we 
imagine. Our deportment depends upon our 
dress. Make a man get into seedy, worn-out 
rags, and he will skulk along with his head hang- 
ing down, like a man going out to fetch his own 
supper beer. But deck out the same article in 
gorgeous raiment and fine linen, and he will strut 
down the main thoroughfare, swinging his cane, 
and looking at the girls, as perky as a bantam 
cock. 



17^ ON- DkESB AND DEPORTMENT. 

Clothes alter our very nature. A man could 
not help being fierce and daring with a plume in 
his bonnet, a dagger in his belt, and a lot of puffy 
white things all down his sleeves. But, in an 
ulster, he wants to get behind a lamp-post and 
call police. 

I am quite ready to admit that you can find 
sterling merit, honest worth, deep affection, and 
all such like virtues of the roast-beef and plum- 
pudding school, as much, and perhaps more, under 
broadcloth and tweed as ever existed beneath silk 
and velvet ; but the spirit of that knightly chiv- 
alry, that "rode a tilt for lady's love," and "fought 
for lady's smiles," needs the clatter of steel and 
the rustle of plumes to summon it from its grave 
between the dusty folds of tapestry and under- 
neath the musty leaves of moldering chronicles. 

The world must be getting old, I think ; it 
dresses so very soberly now. We have been 
through the infant period of humanity, when we 
used to run about with nothing on but a long, 
loose robe, and liked to have our feet bare. And 
then came the rough, barbaric age, the boyh:.od 
of our race. We didn't care what we wore then, 
but thought it nice to tattoo ourselves all over. 



ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT. 179 

and we never did our»hair. And, after that, the 
world grew into a young man, and became fop- 
pish. It decked itself in flowing curls and scarlet 
doublets, and went courting, and bragging, and 
bouncing — making a brave show. 

But all those merry, foolish days of youth are 
gone, and we are very sober, very solemn — and 
very stupid, some say — now. The world is a 
grave, middle-aged gentleman in this nineteenth 
century, and would be shocked to see itself with 
a bit of finery on. So it dresses in black coats 
and trousers, and black hats, and black boots, and, 
dear me, it is such a very respectable gentleman — 
to think it could ever have gone gadding about as 
a troubadour or a knight-errant, dressed in all 
those fancy colors ! Ah, well ! we are more sensi- 
ble in this age. 

Or, at least, we think ourselves so. It is a gen- 
eral theory nowadays that sense and dullness go 
together. 

Goodness is another quality that always goes 
with blackness. Very good people indeed, you 
will notice, dress altogether in black, even to 
gloves and neckties, and they will probably take 
to black shirts before long. Medium goods in- 



I So OjV d/^ess and deportment. 

dulge in light trousers on week-days, and some of 
them even go so far as to wear fancy waistcoats. 
.On the other hand, people who care nothing for 
a future state go about in light suits; and there 
have been known wretches so abandoned as to 
wear a white hat. Such people, however, are 
never spoken of in genteel society, and perhaps I 
ought not to have referred to them here. 

By the way, talking of light suits, have you 
ever noticed how people stare at you the first 
time you go out in a new light suit? They do 
not notice it so much afterwards. The popula- 
tion of London have got accustomed to it by the 
third time you wear it. I say "you," because I 
am not speaking from my own experience. I do 
not wear such things at all myself. As I said, 
only sinful people do so. 

I wish, though, it were not so, and that one 
could be good, and respectable, and sensible with- 
out making one's-self a guy. I look in the glass 
sometimes at my two long, cylindrical bags (so 
picturesquely rugged about the knees), my stand- 
up collar, and billycock hat, and wonder what right 
I have to go about making God's world hideous. 
Then wild and wicked thous^hts come into mv 



ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT. l8l 

heart. I don't want to be good and respectable. 
(I never can be sensible, I'm told; so that don't 
matter.) I want to put on lavender-colored, 
tights, with red velvet breeches and a green doub- 
let, slashed with yellow; to have a light blue silk 
cloak on my shoulder, and a black eagle's plume 
waving from my hat, and a big sword, and a fal- 
con, and a lance, and a prancing horse, so that I 
might go about and gladden the eyes of the 
people. Why should we all try to look like ants, 
crawling over a dust-heap? Why shouldn't we 
dress a little gayly? I am sure, if we did, we 
should be happier. True, it is a little thing, but 
we are a little race, and what is the use of our pre- 
tending otherwise, and spoiling fun? Let philo- 
sophers get themselves up like old crows if they 
like. But let me be a butterfly. 

Women, at all events, ought to dress prettily. 
It is their duty. They are the flowers of the 
earth, and were meant to show it up. We abuse 
them a good deal, we men ; but, goodness knows, 
the old world would be dull enough without their 
dresses and fair faces. How they brighten up 
every place they come into ! What a sunny com- 
motion they — relations, of course — make in our 



1 82 ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT. 

dingy bachelor chambers ! and what a deHghtful 
litter their ribbons and laces, and gloves and hats, 
and parasols and 'kerchiefs make ! It is as if 
a wandering rainbow had dropped in to pay us a 
visit. 

It is one of the chief charms of the summer, to 
my mind, the way our little maids come out in 
pretty colors. I like to see the pink and blue and 
white, glancing between the trees, dotting the 
green fields, and flashing back the sunlight. You 
can see the bright colors such a long way off. 
There are four white dresses climbing a hill in 
front of my window now. I can see them dis- 
tinctly, though it is three miles away. I thought, 
at first, they were milestones out for a lark. It's 
so nice to be able to see the darlings a long way 
off. Especially if they happen to be your wife 
and your mother-in-law. 

Talking of fields and milestones, reminds me 
that I want to say, in all seriousness, a few words 
about women's boots. The women of these 
islands all wear boots too big for them. They 
can never get a boot to fit. The bootmakers do 
not keep sizes small enough. 

Over and over again have I known women sit 



ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT. 183 

down on the top rail of a stile, and declare they 
could not go a step farther, because their boots 
hurt them so ; and it has always been the same 
complaint — too big. 

It is time this state of things was altered. In 
the name of the husbands and fathers of Eng- 
land, I call upon the bootmakers to reform. Our 
wives, our daughters, and our cousins are not to 
be lamed and tortured with impunity. Why can- 
not "narrow twos" be kept more in stock? that is 
the size I find most women take. 

The waistband is another item of feminine 
apparel that is always too big. The dressmakers 
make these things so loose that the hooks and 
eyes by which they are fastened burst of/, every 
now and then, with a report like thunder. 

Why women suffer these wrongs — why they do 
not insist in having their clothes made small 
enough for them, I cannot conceive. It can 
hardly be that they are disinclined to trouble 
themselves about matters of mere dress, for dress 
is the one subject that they really do think about. 
It is the only topic they ever get thoroughly 
interested in, and they talk about it all day long. 
If you see two women together, you may bet 



-184 ON DRESS AND DEPOKTMENT. 

your bottom dollar they are discussing their own 
or their friend's clothes. You notice a couple of 
child-like beings, conversing by a window, and 
you wonder what sweet, helpful words are falling 
from their sainted lips. So you move nearer, and 
then you hear one say — 

"So I took in the waistband, and let out a 
seam, and it fits beautifully now.'* 

"Well," says the other, "I shall wear my plum- 
colored body to the Jones's, with a yellow plas- 
tron ; and they've got some lovely gloves at Put- 
tick's, only one and elevenpence." 

I went for a drive through a part of Derbyshire 
once, with a couple of ladies. It was a beauti- 
ful bit of country, and they enjoyed themselves 
immensely. They talked dressmaking the whole 
time. 

"Pretty view, that," I would say, waving my 
umbrella round. "Look at those blue, distant 
hills! That little white speck, nestling in the 
woods, is Chatsworth, and over there — " 

"Yes, very pretty indeed," one would reply. 
"Well, why not get a yard of sarsenet?" 

"What, and leave the skirt exactly as it is?" 

"Certainly. What place d'ye call this?" 



ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT. 185 

Then I would draw their attention to the fresh 
beauties that kept sweeping into view, and they 
would glance round, and say "charming," 
"sweetly pretty," and immediately go off into 
raptures over each other's pocket-handkerchiefs, 
and mourn with one another over the decadence 
of cambric frilling. 

I believe if two women were cast together upon 
a desert island, they would spend each day argu- 
ing the respective merits of sea-shells and bird's 
eggs, considered as trimmings, and would have a 
new fashion in fig leaves every month. 

Very young men think a good deal about 
clothes, but they don't talk about them to each 
other. They would not find much encourage- 
ment. A fop is not a favorite with his own sex. 
Indeed, he gets a good deal more abuse from 
them than is necessary. His is a harmless fail- 
ing, and it soon wears out. Besides, a man who 
has no foppery at twenty will be a slatternly, 
dirty-collar, unbrushed-coat man at forty. A 
little foppishness in a young man is good ; it is 
human. I like to see a young cock ruffle his 
feathers, stretch his neck, and crow as if the 
whole world belonged to him. I don't like a 



1 86 ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT. 

modest, retiring man. Nobody does — not really, 
however much they may prate about modest 
worth, and other things they do not understand. 

A meek deportment is a great mistake in the 
world. Uriah Heap's father was a very poor 
judge of human nature, cr he would not have 
told his son, as he did, that people liked humble- 
ness. There is nothing annoys them more, as a 
rule. Rows are half the fun of life, and you 
can't have rows with humble, meek-answered indi- 
viduals. They turn away our wrath, and that is 
just what we do not want. We want to let it 
out. We have worked ourselves up into a state 
of exhilarating fury, and then just as we are 
anticipating the enjoyment of a vigorous set to, 
they spoil all our plans with their exasperating 
humility. 

Xantippe's life must have been one long 
misery, tied to that calmly irritating man, Socra- 
tes. Fancy a married woman doomed to live on 
from day to day without one single quarrel with 
her husband ! A man ought to humor his wife 
in these things. Heaven knows their lives are 
dull enough, poor girls. They have none of the 
enjoyments we have. They go to no political 



ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT. 187 

meetings; they may not even belong to the local 
amateur parliament ; they are excluded from 
smoking carriages on the Metropolitan railway, 
and they never see a comic paper — or if they do, 
they do not know it is comic: nobody tells them. 

Surely, with existence such a dreary blank for 
them as this, we might provide a little row for 
their amusement now and then, even if we do not 
feel inclined for it ourselves. A really sensible 
man does so, and is loved accordingly, for it is 
little acts of kindness such as this that go straight 
to a woman's heart. It is such like proofs of lov- 
ing self-sacrifice that make her tell her female 
friends what a good husband he was — after he is 
dead. 

Yes, poor Xantippe must have had a hard 
time of it. The bucket episode was particularly 
sad for her. Poor woman ! she did think she 
would rouse him up a bit with that. She had 
taken the trouble to fill the bucket, perhaps been 
a long way to get specially dirty water. And she 
waited for him. And then to be met in such a 
way, after all ! Most likely she sat down, and 
had a good cry afterwards. It must have seemed 
all so hopeless to the poor child ; and, for all we 



1 88 ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT. 

know, she had no mother to whom she could go 
and abuse him. 

What was it to her that her husband was a 
great philosopher? Great philosophy don't 
count in married life. 

There was a very good little boy once who 
wanted to go to sea. And the captain asked 
him what he could do. He said he could do the 
multiplication table backwards, and paste sea- 
weed in a book ; that he knew how man}' times 
the word '' begat " occurred in the Old Testa- 
ment ; and could recite " The Boy stood on the 
Burning Deck,'* and Wordsworth's '' We are 
Seven." 

** Werry good — werry good, indeed," said the 
man of the sea, " and ken yer kerry coals?" 

It is just the same when you want to marry. 
Great ability is not required so much as little 
usefulness. Brains are at a discount in the 
married state. There is no demand for them, no 
appreciation even. Our wives sum us up accord- 
ing to a standard of their own, in which bril- 
liancy of intellect obtains no marks. Your lady 
and mistress is not at all impressed by your 
cleverness and talent, my dear reader — not in 



ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT. 189 

the slightest. Give her a man who can do an 
errand neatly, without attempting to use his own 
judgment over it, or any damned nonsense of 
that kind ; and who can be trusted to hold a 
child the right way up, and not make himself 
objectionable whenever there is lukewarm mut- 
ton for dinner. That is the sort of a husband a 
sensible woman likes ; not one of your scientific 
or literary nuisances, who ^o upsetting the 
whole house, and putting everybody out with 
their foolishness. 



I 



ON MEMORY, 

" I remember, I remember, 
In the days of chill November, 
How the blackbird on the " 

FORGET the rest. It is the beginning of 

the first piece of poetry I ever learnt ; for 

•' Hey, diddle diddle, 
The cat and the fiddle," 

I take no note of, it being of a frivolous charac- 
ter, and lacking in the qualities of true poetry. I 
collected fourpence by the recital of " I remember, 
I remember." I knew it was fourpence, because 
they told me that if I kept it until I got twopence 
more I should have sixpence, w^hich argument, 
albeit undeniable, moved me not, and the money 
was squandered, to the best of my recollection, 
on the very next morning, although upon what 
memory is a blank. 

That is just the way with Memory ; nothing 
that she brings to us is complete. She is a wilful 
child ; all her toys are broken. I remember 

iqo 



ON MEMORY. I91 

tumbling into a huge dusthole, when a very 
small boy, but I have not the faintest recollection 
of ever getting out again ; and, if memory were 
all we had to trust to, I should be compelled to 
believe I was there still. At another time — some 
years later — I was assisting at an exceedingly 
interesting love scene ; but the only thing about 
it I can call to mind distinctly is that, at the most 
critical moment, somebody suddenly opened the 
door and said : *' Emily, you're wanted," in a 
sepulchral tone, that gave one the idea the police 
had come for her. All the tender words she said 
to me, and all the beautiful things I said to her, 
are utterly forgotten. 

Life, altogether, is but a crumbling ruin, when 
we turn to look behind : a shattered column here, 
where a massive portal stood ; the broken shaft 
of a window to mark my lady's bower ; and a 
mouldering heap of blackened stones where the 
glowing flames once leapt, and, over all, the tinted 
lichen and the ivy clinging green. 

For everything looms pleasant through the 
softening haze of time. Even the sadness that is 
past seems sweet. Our boyish days look very 
merry to us now, all nutting, hoop, and ginger- 



192 ON MEMORY, 

bread. The snubbings and toothaches and the 
Latin verbs are all forgotten — the Latin verbs 
especially. And we fancy we were very happy 
when we were hobbledehoys, and loved ; and we 
wish that we could love again. We never think 
of the heartaches, or the sleepless nights, or the 
hot dryness of our throats, when she said she 
could never be anything to us but a sister — as if 
any man wanted more sisters ! 

Yes, it is the brightness, not the darkness, that 
we see when we look back. The sunshine casts 
no shadows on the past. The road that we have 
traversed stretches very fair behind us. We see 
not the sharp stones. We dwell but on the roses 
by the wayside, and the strong briars that stung 
us are, to our distant eyes, but gentle tendrils 
waving in the wind. God be thanked that it is 
so — that the ever-lengthening chain of memory 
has only pleasant links, and that the bitterness 
and sorrow of to-day are smiled at on the 
morrow. 

It seems as though the brightest side of every- 
thing were also its highest and best, so that, as 
our little lives sink back behind us into the dark 
sea of forgetfulness, all that which is the lightest 



ON MEMORY. 193 

and the most gladsome is the last to sink, and 
stands above the waters, long in sight, when the 
angry thoughts and smarting pain are buried 
deep below the waves and trouble us no more. 

It is this glamour of the past, I suppose, that 
makes old folk talk so much nonsense about the 
days when they were young. The world appears 
to have been a very superior sort of place then, 
and things were more like what they ought to be. 
Boys were^ioy^ then, and girls were very differ- 
ent. Also winters were something like winters, 
and summers not at all the wretched things we 
get put off with nowadays. As for the wonder- 
ful deeds people did in those times, and the 
extraordinary events that happened, it takes 
three strong men to believe half of them. 

I like to hear one of the old boys telling all 
about it to a party of youngsters who he knows 
cannot contradict him. It is odd if, after a 
while, he doesn't swear that the moon shone 
every night when he was a boy, and that tossing 
mad bulls in a blanket was the favorite sport at 
his school. 

It always has been, and always will be the 
same. The old folk of our grandfathers* young 



194 ON MEMORY, 

days SccTig a song bearing exactly the same bur- 
den ; and the young folk of to-day will drone out 
precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of 
the next generation. '* Oh give me back the 
good old days of fifty years ago," has been the 
cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday. Take 
up the literature of 1835, and you will find the 
poets and novelists asking for the same impossi- 
ble gift, as did the German Minnesingers, long 
before them, and the old Norse Saga writers long 
before that. And for the same thing sighed the 
early prophets and the philosophers of ancient 
Greece. From all accounts, the world has been 
getting worse and worse ever since it was 
created. All I can say is that it must have been 
a remarkably delightful place when it was first 
opened to the public, for it is very pleasant, 
even now, if you only keep as much as possible 
in the sunshine, and take the rain good-tem- 
peredly. 

Yet there is no gainsaying but what it must 
have been somewhat sweeter in that dewy morn- 
ing of creation, when it was young and fresh, 
when the feet of the tramping millions had not 
trodden its grass to dust, nor the din of the 



ON MEMORY. 195 

myriad cities chased the silence for ever away. 
Life must have been noble and solemn to those 
free-footed, loose-robed fathers of the human 
race, walking hand-in-hand with God under the 
great sky. They live(f in sun-kissed tents amidst 
the lowing herds. They took their simple wants 
from the loving hand of Nature. They toiled 
and talked and thought ; and the great earth 
rolled around in stillness, not yet laden with 
trouble and wrong. 

Those days are past now. The quiet child- 
hood of Humanity, spent in the far-off forest 
glades, and by the murmuring rivers, is gone for 
ever; and human life is deepening down to man- 
hood amidst tumult, doubt, and hope. Its age 
of restful peace is past. It has its work to finish, 
and must hasten on. What that work may be — 
what this world's share is in the great Design 
— we know not, though our unconscious hands 
are helping to accomplish it. Like the tiny coral 
insect, working deep under the dark waters, we 
strive and struggle each for our own little ends, 
nor dream of the vast Fabric we are building up 
for God. 

Let us have done with vain regrets and long- 



196 ON MEMORY. 

ings for the days that never will be ours again. 
Our work lies in front, not behind us; and " For- 
ward ! " is our motto. Let us not sit with folded 
hands, gazing upon the past as if it were the 
building ; it is but the foundation. Let us not 
waste heart and life, thinking of what might 
have been, and forgetting the may-be that lies 
before us. Opportunities flit by while we sit re- 
gretting the chances we have lost, and the happi- 
ness that comes to us we heed not, because of 
the happiness that is gone. 

Years ago, when I used to wander of an even- 
ing from the fireside to the pleasant land of fair)- 
tales, I met a doughty knight and true. Man}- 
dangers had he overcome, in many lands hai' 
been ; and all men knew him for a brave and 
well-tried knight, and one that knew not fear ; 
except, maybe, upon such seasons when even a 
brave man might feel afraid, and yet not Lc 
ashamed. Now, as this knight, one day, was 
pricking wearily along a toilsome road, his heart 
misgave him, and was sore within him, because 
of the trouble of the way. Rocks, dark and of 
a monstrous size, hung high above his head, and 
like enough it seemed unto the knight that they 



ON MEMORY. 197 

should fall, and he He low beneath them. Chasms 
there were on either side, and darksome caves, 
wherein fierce robbers lived, and dragons, very 
terrible, whose jaws dripped blood. And upon 
the road there hung a darkness as of night. So 
it came over that good knight that he would no 
more press forward, but seek another road, less 
grievously beset with difficulty unto his gentle 
steed. But, when in haste he turned and looked 
behind, much marveled our brave knight, for, lo ! 
of all the way that he had ridden, there was 
naught for eye to see ; but, at his horse's heels, 
there yawned a mighty gulf, whereof no man 
might ever spy the bottom, so deep was that 
same gulf. Then, when Sir Ghelent saw that of 
going back there was none, he prayed to good 
Saint Cuthbert, and, setting spurs into his steed, 
rode forward bravely and most joyously. And 
naught harmed him. 

There is no returning on the road of life. The 
frail bridge of Time, on which we tread, sinks 
back into eternity at every step we take. The 
past is gone from us for ever. It is gathered in 
and garnered. It belongs to us no more. No 
single word can ever be unspoken ; no single 



198 ON MEMORY. 

step retraced. Therefore, it beseems us, as true 
knights, to prick on bravely, not idly weep 
because we cannot now recall. 

A new life begins for us with every second. 
Let us go forward joyously to meet it. We must 
press on, whether we will or no, and we shall 
walk better with our eyes before us than with 
them ever cast behind. 

A friend came to me the other day, and urged 
me very eloquently to learn some wonderful 
system by which you never forgot anything. I 
don't know why he was so eager on the subject, 
unless it be that I occasionally borrow an um- 
brella, and have a knack of coming out, in the 
middle of a game of whist, with a mild " Lor! 
I've been thinking all along that clubs were 
trumps." I declined the suggestion, however, in 
spite of the advantages he so attractively set 
forth. I have no wish to remember everything. 
There are many things in most men's lives that 
had better be forgotten. There is that time, 
many years ago, when we did not act quite as 
honorably, quite as uprightly, as we, perhaps, 
should have done — that unfortunate deviation 
from the path of strict probity w^e once com- 



ON MEMORY. 199 

mitted, and in which, more unfortunate still, we 
were found out — that act of folly, of meanness, of 
wrong. Ah well ! we paid the penalty, suffered 
the maddening hours of vain remorse, the hot 
3.gony of shame, the scorn, perhaps, of those we 
loved. Let us forget. Oh, Father Time, lift 
with your kindly hands those bitter memories 
from off our overburdened hearts, for griefs are 
ever coming to us with the coming hours, and 
our little strength is only as the day. 

Not that the past should be buried. The 
music of life would be mute if the chords of 
memory were snapped asunder. It is but the 
poisonous weeds, not the flowers, that we should 
root out from the garden of Mnemosyne. Do 
you remember Dickens's " Haunted Man," how 
he prayed for forgetfulness, and how, when his 
prayer was answered, he prayed for memory once 
more ? We do not want all the ghosts laid. It 
is only the haggard, cruel-eyed specters that we 
flee from. Let the gentle, kindly phantoms 
haunt us as they will ; we are not afraid of them. 

Ah me ! the world grows very full of ghosts as 
we grow older. We need not seek in dismal 
churchyards nor sleep in moated granges, to see 



200 ON MEMORY. 

their shadowy faces, and hear the rusth'ngof their 
garments in the night. Every house, every room, 
every creaking chair has its own particular ghost. 
They haunt the empty chambers of our lives, 
they throng around us like dead leaves, whirled 
in the autumn wind. Some are living, some are 
dead. We know not. We clasped their hands 
once, loved them, quarreled with them, laughed 
with them, told them our thoughts and hopes 
and aims, as they told us theirs, till it seemed our 
very hearts had joined in a grip that would defy 
the puny power of Death. They are gone now ; 
lost to us for ever. Their eyes will never look 
into ours again, and their voices we shall never 
hear. Only their ghosts come to us, and talk 
with us. We see them, dim and shadowy, 
through our tears. We stretch our yearning 
hands to them, but they are air. 

Ghosts! They are with us night and day. 
They walk beside us in the busy street, under 
the glare of the sun. They sit by us in the twi- 
light at home. We see their little faces looking 
from the windows of the old school-house. We 
meet them in the woods and lanes, where we 
shouted and played as boys. Hark! cannot you 



ON MEMORY. 20 1 

hear their low laughter from behind the black- 
berry bushes, and their distant whoops along the 
grassy glades? Down here, through the quiet 
fields, and by the wood, where the evening 
shadows are lurking, winds the path where we 
used to watch for her at sunset. Look, she is 
there now, in the dainty, white frock we knew so 
well, with the big bonnet dangling from her little 
hands, and the sunny brown hair all tangled. 
Five thousand miles away ! Dead for all we 
know ! What of that ? She is beside us now, 
and we can look into her laughing eyes, and hear 
her voice. She will vanish at the stile by the 
wood, and we shall be alone ; and the shadows 
will creep out across the fields, and the night 
wind will sweep past moaning. Ghosts ! they 
are always with us, and always will be, while the 
sad old world keeps echoing to the sob of long 
good-byes, while the cruel ships sail away across 
the great seas, and the cold, green earth lies 
heavy on the hearts of those we loved. 

But, oh, ghosts, the world would be sadder still 
without you. Come to us, and speak to us, oh 
you ghosts of our old loves ! Ghosts of play- 
mates, and of sweethearts, and old friends, of all 



202 ON MEMORY. 

you laughing boys and girls, oh, come to us, and 
be with us, for the world is very lonely, and new 
friends and faces are not like the old, and we 
cannot love them, nay, nor laugh with them as 
we have loved and laughed with you. And 
when we walked together, oh, ghosts of our 
youth, the world was very gay and bright ; but 
now it has grown old, and we are growing weary, 
and only you can bring the brightness and the 
freshness back to us. 

Memory is a rare ghost raiser. Like a haunted 
house, its walls are ever echoing to unseen feet. 
Through the broken casements we watch the flit- 
ting shadows of the dead, and the saddest shad- 
ows of them all are the shadows of our own dead 
selves. 

Oh, those young bright faces, so full of truth 
and honor, of pure, good thoughts, of noble long- 
ings, how reproachfully they look upon us, with 
their deep, clear eyes ! 

I fear they have good cause for their sorrow, 
poor lads. Lies and cunning, and disbelief have 
crept into our hearts since those pre-shaving 
days — and we meant to be so great and good. 

It is well we cannot see into the future. There 



ON MEMORY. 203 

are few boys of fourteen who wf^vdd not feel 
ashamed of themselves at forty. 

I like to sit and have a talk sometimes with 
that odd little chap that was myself long ago. 
I think he likes it too, for he comes so often of 
an evening when I am alone with my pipe, listen- 
ing to the whispering of the flames I see his 
solemn little face looking at me through the 
scented smoke as it floats upward, and I smile at 
him ; and he smiles back at me, but his is such a 
grave, old-fashioned smile. We chat about old 
times ; and now and then he takes me by the 
hand, and then we slip through the black bars of 
the grate and down the dusky glowing caves to 
the land that lies behind the firelight. There we 
find the days that used to be, and we wander 
along them together. He tells me as we walk 
all he thinks and feels. I laugh at him now and 
then, but the next moment I wish I had not, for 
he looks so grave, I am ashamed of being frivol- 
ous. Besides, it is not showing proper respect to 
one so much older than myself — to one who ivas 
myself so very long before / became myself. 

We don't talk much at first, but look atone 
another : I down at his curly hair and little blue 



204 ON MEMORY, 

bow, he up sideways at me as he trots. And, 
somehow, I fancy the shy, round eyes do not 
altogether approve of me, and he heaves a httle 
sigh, as though he were disappointed. But, after 
a while, his bashfulness wears off, and he begins 
to chat. He tells me his favorite fairy tales, 
he can do up to six times, and he has a guinea- 
pig, and pa says fairy tales aint true ; and isn't 
it a pity, 'cos he would so like to be a knight and 
fight a dragon and marry a beautiful princess. 
But he takes a more practical view of life when 
he reaches seven, and would prefer to grow up, 
be a bargee, and earn a lot of money. Maybe, 
this is the consequence of falling in love, which 
he does about this time, with the young lady at 
the milk-shop aet. six. (God bless her little ever- 
dancing feet, whatever size they may be now !) 
He must be very fond of her, for he gives her 
one day his chiefest treasure, to wit, a huge 
pocket-knife with four rusty blades and a cork- 
screw, which latter has a knack of working itself 
out in some mysterious manner, and sticking into 
its owner's leg. She is an affectionate little 
thing, and she throws her arms round his neck 
and kisses him for it, then and there, outside 



ON MEMORY, 205 

the shop. But the stupid world (in the person 
of the boy at the cigar emporium next door) jeers 
at such tokens of love. Whereupon my young 
friend very properly prepares to punch the head 
of the boy at the cigar emporium next do' 
but fails in the attempt, the boy at the ci 
emporium next door punching his instead. 

And then comes school life, with its bitter 
little sorrows and its joyous shoutings, its jolly 
larks, and its hot tears falling on beastly Latin 
grammars and silly old copy-books. It is at 
school that he injures himself for life — as I 
firmly believe — trying to pronounce German ; 
and it is there, too, that he learns of the impor- 
tance attached by the French nation to pens, 
ink, and paper. *' Have you pens, ink, and 
paper?" is the first question asked by one 
Frenchman of another on their meeting. The 
other fellow has not any of them, as a rule, but 
says that the uncle of his brother has got them 
all three. The first fellow doesn't appear to care 
a hang about the uncle of the other fellow's 
brother; what he wants to know now is, has 
the neighbor of the other fellow's mother got 
'em? "The neighbor of my mother has no pens, 



2o6 'on memory. 

no ink, and no paper," replies the other man, be- 
ginning to get wild. " Has the child of thy 
female gardener some pens, some ink, or some 
paper?" He has him there. After worrying 
enough about these wretched inks, pens, and 
paper to make everybody miserable, it turns out 
that the child of his own female gardener hasn't 
any. Such a discovery would shut up any one 
but a French exercise man. It has no effect at 
all, though, on this shameless creature. He 
never thinks of apologizing, but says his aunt has 
some mustard. 

So, in the acquisition of more or less useless 
knowledge, soon happily to be forgotten, boy- 
hood passes away. The red-brick schoolhouse 
fades from view, and we turn down into the 
world's high road. My little friend is no longer 
little now. The short jacket has sprouted tails. 
The battered cap, so useful as a combination of 
pocket-handkerchief, drinking-cup, and weapon 
of attack, has grown high and glossy ; and in- 
stead of a slate-pencil in his mouth there is a 
cigarette, the smoke of which troubles him, for it 
will get up his nose. He tries a cigar a little 
later on, as being more stylish — a big, black 



ON MEMORY. 207 

Havannah. It doesn't seem altogether to agree 
with him, for I find him sitting over a bucket in 
the back kitchen afterwards, solemnly swearing 
never to smoke again. 

And now his moustache begins to be almost 
visible to the naked eye, whereupon he immedi- 
ately takes to brandy-and-sodas, and fancies him- 
self a man. He talks about *' two to one against 
the favorite," refers to actresses as " Little 
Emmy," and "Kate" and *'Baby," and murmurs 
about his '* losses at cards the other night," in a 
style implying that thousands have been squan- 
dered, though, to do him justice, the actual 
amount is most probably one-and-twopence. 
Also, if I see aright — for it is always twilight in 
this land of memories — he sticks an eyeglass in 
his eye, and stumbles over everything. 

His female relations, much troubled at these 
things, pray for him (bless their gentle hearts !) 
and see visions of Old Bailey trials and halters as 
the only possible outcome of such reckless dissi- 
pation ; and the prediction of his first school- 
master, that he would come to a bad end, 
assumes the proportions of inspired prophecy. 

He has a lordly contempt at this age for the 



2o8 ON MEMORY. 

other sex, a blatantly good opinion of himself, 
and a sociably patronizing manner towards all the 
elderly male friends of the family. Altogether, 
it must be confessed, he is somewhat of a 
nuisance about this time. 

It does not last long, though. He falls in love 
in a little while, and that soon takes the bounce 
out of him. I notice his boots are much too 
small for him now, and his hair is fearfully and 
wonderfully arranged. He reads poetry more 
than he used, and he keeps a rhyming dictionary 
in his bedroom. Every morning, on the floor, 
Emily Jane find scraps of torn-up paper, and 
reads thereon of " cruel hearts and love's deep 
darts," of " beauteous eyes and lovers' sighs," 
and much more of the old, old song that lads so 
love to sing, and lassies love to listen to, while 
giving their dainty heads a toss, and pretending 
never to hear. 

The course of love, however, seems not to 
have run smoothly, for, later on, he takes more 
walking exercise and less sleep, poor boy, than is 
good for him ; and his face is suggestive of any- 
thing but wedding bells and happiness ever 
after. 



ON MEMORY. 209 

And here he seems to vanish. The little, 
boyish self that has grown up beside me as we 
walked, is gone. 

I am alone, and the road is very dark. I 
stumble on, I know not how nor care, for the 
way seems leading nowhere, and there is no light 
to guide. 

But at last the morning comes, and I find that 
I have grown into myself. 






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